Stanford Researchers Develop Flexible, Biodegradable Semiconductor

Engineers have become quite good at designing ever more powerful and advanced electronics, but we’re not so good at properly disposing of them when they’re out of date. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that almost 50 million tons of electronics waste will end up in landfills this year, a 20 percent increase over last year.

- Ryan Whitwam

With that troubling statistic in mind, Stanford engineer Zhenan Bao and her team set out to design a new type of semiconductor that could simply biodegrade when it’s no longer needed.

The key to this new semiconductor is a polymer that degrades into harmless organic molecules. It’s a flexible sheet that can bend and stretch to fit almost any given structure, although this requires the use of other specialized components—the concept wouldn’t be very useful if the semiconductor was flexible but the rest of the board was not.