​A battle won! Our self-destructible electronics paper has been accepted to Adv. Mater. Tech. by Wiley-VCH! Since US Defense has expressed their interest, a handful of research groups have proposed and have been working on this. In today’s digital age, our increasing dependence on information also makes us vulnerable to potential invasion of privacy and cyber security. Consider a scenario in which a hard drive is stolen, lost or misplaced which contains secured and valuable information. In such a case, it’s important to have the ability to remotely destroy the sensitive part of the device (e.g. memory or processor) if it’s not possible to regain it. Many emerging materials and even some traditional materials like silicon, aluminum, zinc oxide, tungsten, magnesium, etc. which are often used for logic processor and memory, show promise to be gradually dissolved upon exposure of various liquid medium. However, often these wet processes are too slow, fully destructive and require assistance from the liquid materials and their suitable availability at the time of need. Here we show joule heating effect induced thermal expansion and stress gradient between thermally expandable advanced polymeric material and flexible bulk mono-crystalline silicon (100) to destroy high performance solid state electronics as needed and in under 10 seconds. We also show different stimuli assisted smart phone operated remote destruction of such CMOS electronics.

 

Expandable Polymer Enabled Wirelessly Destructible High Performance Solid State Electronics

Abdurrahman Gumus, Arsalan Alam, Aftab M. Hussain, Kush Mishra, Irmandy Wicaksono, Galo A. Torres Sevilla, Sohail F. Shaikh, Marlon Diaz,  Seneca Velling, Mohamed T. Ghoneim, Sally M. Ahmed, Muhammad M. Hussain

 

Congrats everyone – job well done!​