Critical communications component made on flexible wooden film

Research by a University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer leverages a surprising and inexpensive substance—wood—to make the flexible microwave circuits that power modern communications. In industrial automation applications, it has the potential to decrease size of control system devices and systems, saving plant floor, cabinet space, or enabling new distributed wireless sensors, transmitters, controls or actuators.

In the not-too-distant future, flexible electronics will open the door to new products like foldable phones, rollable tablets, and paper-thin displays, beyond widely developed wearable sensors that monitor health data. Developing these new bendy products, however, means using novel materials like new plastics and thin films to replace the rigid circuit boards and bulky electronic components that currently occupy the interiors of cell phones and other gadgets.

Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his collaborators constructed a functional microwave amplifier circuit on a substrate of cellulose nanofibril paper, a wood product.

For more than a decade, Ma has been creating microwave flexible electronics, including thin-film transistors and other components. Microwave components, which are used in wireless communication, have proved difficult to produce in a flexible form and are typically constructed on integrated semiconductor chips or printed on circuit boards. Flexible versions, however, could have widespread applications in wearable devices, drones and as part of large-area microwave arrays used in 5G and advanced communication systems.

Previous attempts to produce flexible microwave amplifiers used rigid semiconductor-based integrated circuits that were thinned down and moved to flexible substrates, an expensive cost-prohibitive approach. In the new amplifier, Ma and his colleagues began with cellulose nanofibril paper as the substrate. The paper is made by breaking wood fiber down into a nanoscale fibrils, or tiny slender fibers, then recombining them to produce a strong, flexible, transparent and biodegradable film.

Instead of layering the entire wood substrate with expensive gallium nitride, currently the highest performing microwave transistor material, the team used just a speck of the compound. “We have a new strategy here,” Ma said. “We use a tiny bead of the expensive substance, 500 microns by 500 microns, and the rest is wood. Compared to the gallium nitride, the cost of the wood is essentially nothing. The final outcome is an amplifier that works very well.”

The flexible circuit can output 10 milliwatts of power beyond 5 gigahertz, and the cellulose nanofibril substrate is just as compatible with the microwave components as polyethylene substrates. That’s not the only aspect that Ma is excited about. Since it is made of wood fiber, the entire circuit easily decomposes or burns, essentially leaving behind no electronic waste. In their paper, Ma and his team demonstrate this, setting the chip alight with a candle and leaving behind just a small smattering of ash in just a few seconds.

“If you look at your own house, there are probably lots of old electronics,” Ma said. “There are TVs, computer monitors, phones – all full of electronic circuits. You can’t do much with them and that generates a lot of waste. We can replace a lot of existing components with these types of circuits.”

– Edited by Chris Vavra, associate editor, Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology, cvavra@cfemedia.com.

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