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Recently, microfluidic stretchable electronics has attracted great interest from academia since conductive liquids allow for larger cross-sections when stretched and hence low resistance at longer lengths. However, as a serial process it has suffered from low throughput, and a parallel processing technology is needed for more complex systems and production at low costs. In this work, we demonstrate such a technology to implement microfluidic electronics by stencil printing of a liquid alloy onto a semi-cured polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate, assembly of rigid active components, encapsulation by pouring uncured PDMS on-top and subsequent curing. The printing showed resolution of 200 μm and linear resistance increase of the liquid conductors when elongated up to 60%. No significant change of resistance was shown for a circuit with one LED after 1000 times of cycling between a 0% and an elongation of 60% every 2 s. A radio frequency identity (RFID) tag was demonstrated using the developed technology, showing that good performance could be maintained well into the radio frequency (RF) range.
Jeong et al. (2012) studied this question.