Abstract: After the rapid development following the Moore’s law for over 50 years, microelectronics now starts to take on new directions, including delivering new functions (such as artificial intelligence), becoming human and environment friendly, e.g., interfacing with human bodies and coping with the circular economy. For progressing along these emerging trends, building microelectronics with functional polymers stands as a highly promising avenue, as benefited from polymers’ biomimetic property of conducting ions, human-like soft mechanics, and broadly tunable material designs.

In this talk, I will introduce our new material design and device concepts for creating new types of polymer-based microelectronic devices, including neuromorphic computing devices, light-emitting diodes, field-effect transistors and circuits, biosensors, each of which possesses new functions and/or human-integratable properties. I will further discuss the opportunities created for both fundamental studies of the physical behaviors of these electronic and optoelectronic polymers, and emerging application directions including artificial intelligence and human-mimetic robotics. Collectively, our research is extending microelectronics into a new realm that is based on distinct material and device physics/chemistry, and provides unparalleled potentials for new technological directions.