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Electromigration Induced Break-up Phenomena in Liquid Metal Printed Thin Films

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Abstract

Room temperature liquid metal (RTLM)-related electronics has recently been found increasingly important in a wide variety of emerging areas. In particular, printable liquid metal ink opens the way for direct writing of electronics spanning form microscale to even nanoscale. However, such fluid-like circuits also raised important fundamental as well as practical issues for solving. A big issue facing its future large-scale application is that the failure features of the conductive wires under electrical current densities are not clear. Here, we discovered for the first time that a liquid metal thin film would be broken by the so-called electromigration effect as the applied current increases to a critical magnitude. A theoretical model was established to preliminarily interpret the phenomena and the related effects. The break-up effect in the liquid metal-based circuits could be one of the major hurdles that must be tackled with caution in the research and application of future liquid metal technologies, especially for the printed microelectronics thus enabled.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Key Lab of CryoBiomedical Engineering and Key Lab of Cryogenics, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Rongchao Ma, Yixin Zhou & Jing Liu

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Cangran Guo & Jing Liu

Authors
  1. Rongchao Ma
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  2. Cangran Guo
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  3. Yixin Zhou
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  4. Jing Liu
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Correspondence to Jing Liu.

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Ma, R., Guo, C., Zhou, Y. et al. Electromigration Induced Break-up Phenomena in Liquid Metal Printed Thin Films. J. Electron. Mater. 43, 4255–4261 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-014-3366-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-014-3366-0

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