A Physically Transient Form of Silicon Electronics, With Integrated Sensors, Actuators and Power Supply

By Suk-Won Hwang, H. Tao, Dae-Hyeong Kim, Huanyu Cheng, Jun‐Kyul Song, E. Rill, M. Brenckle, B. Panilaitis, S. Won, Yun-Soung Kim and 11 more. Science, 2012

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Reversible Implants Silicon electronics are generally designed to be stable and robust—it would be counterproductive if the key parts of your computer or cell phone slowly dissolved away while you were using it. In order to develop transient electronics for use as medical implants, Hwang et al. (p. 1640, see the cover) produced a complete set of tools and materials that would be needed to make standard devices. Devices were designed to have a specific lifetime, after which the component materials, such as porous silicon and silk, would be resorbed by the body. A platform of materials and fabrication methods furnishes resorbable electronic devices for in vivo use. A remarkable feature of modern silicon electronics is its ability to remain physically invariant, almost indefinitely for practical purposes. Although this characteristic is a hallmark of applications of integrated circuits that exist today, there might be opportunities for systems that offer the opposite behavior, such as implantable devices that function for medically useful time frames but then completely disappear via resorption by the body. We report a set of materials, manufacturing schemes, device components, and theoretical design tools for a silicon-based complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology that has this type of transient behavior, together with integrated sensors, actuators, power supply systems, and wireless control strategies. An implantable transient device that acts as a programmable nonantibiotic bacteriocide provides a system-level example.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f27958e54db39b6db8b04c103cec5c59ffc3502

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The 2021 battery technology roadmap (2020, background): “The need for transient implantable medical devices (TIMDs) for monitoring to enable a stimulation for treatment of diseases is growing [150].”