Highly Conductive Flexible Metal–Ceramic Nanolaminate Electrode for High-Performance Soft Electronics

Realization of flexible electronics is an attractive challenge because of its great potential in many applications. However, the design of flexible and highly conductive metal electrodes has been a bottleneck for the fabrication of flexible devices because bulk metals are easily fractured when subjected to elongation or compression. Here, we demonstrate metal–ceramic nanolaminates as electrodes for flexible electronic devices. Insertion of ceramic layers, each with a thickness of a few nanometers, into an otherwise metal electrode significantly improved its strength and bending stability and only slightly reduced its electrical conductivity. Finally, we demonstrated that a touch screen panel fabricated with metal–ceramic nanolaminate electrodes was stable to 200 000 cycles of folding to a bending radius of 3 mm.