A physically transient form of silicon electronics.

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.

Dissolvable films of silk fibroin for ultrathin conformal bio-integrated electronics.

Electronics that are capable of intimate, non-invasive integration with the soft, curvilinear surfaces of biological tissues offer important opportunities for diagnosing and treating disease and for improving brain/machine interfaces. This article describes a material strategy for a type of bio-interfaced system that relies on ultrathin electronics supported by bioresorbable substrates of silk fibroin. Mounting such devices on tissue and then allowing the silk to dissolve and resorb initiates a spontaneous, conformal wrapping process driven by capillary forces at the biotic/abiotic interface.

Silicon electronics on silk as a path to bioresorbable, implantable devices.

Many existing and envisioned classes of implantable biomedical devices require high performance electronicssensors. An approach that avoids some of the longer term challenges in biocompatibility involves a construction in which some parts or all of the system resorbs in the body over time. This paper describes strategies for integrating single crystalline silicon electronics, where the silicon is in the form of nanomembranes, onto water soluble and biocompatible silk substrates.

Erratum: "Silicon electronics on silk as a path to bioresorbable, implantable devices" [Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 133701 (2009)].

[This corrects the article on p. 133701 in vol. 95.

Infochemistry and infofuses for the chemical storage and transmission of coded information.

This article describes a self-powered system that uses chemical reactions--the thermal excitation of alkali metals--to transmit coded alphanumeric information. The transmitter (an "infofuse") is a strip of the flammable polymer nitrocellulose patterned with alkali metal ions; this pattern encodes the information. The wavelengths of 2 consecutive pulses of light represent each alphanumeric character.

Electronic and molecular structure of aminimides (1-acyl-2,2,2-trimethyldiazan-2-ium-1-ide). 1. Formaminimide (HCON- N+ Me3).

The electronic structure and geometries of (Z)- and (E)-H-CON- N+(CH3)3 have been examined at two levels of theory: B3LYP (basis sets 6-311+G(d,p), 6-311++G(d,p), and 6-311G(3df,3pd)) and MP2(full)/6-311++G(d,p). The (Z) conformation about the C(O)-N(-) bond is thermodynamically preferred over the (E) configuration. Natural bond orbital calculation locates one lone pair of the N- in the HOMO, which is the p(z) natural hybrid orbital (perpendicular to the O=CN- N+ plane).