Soft Electronic Switches and Adaptive Logic Gates Based on Nanostructured Gold Networks

The advent of neuromorphic substrates is promoting the development of in materia autonomous and adaptive devices, employed as hardware solutions to reduce the current inefficiencies of traditional data processing techniques, in terms of energy requirements. The integration of data processing capabilities on soft materials is here focused on the development of the edge computing paradigm of interest for soft robotics and wearable devices. For such purposes, gold nanostructured complex networks produced in the gas phase are employed to fabricate neuromorphic devices. The integration of the latter on a soft Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate equipped with stretchable laser-induced graphene electrodes, is exploited for the production of in materia devices to bridge the gap between data processing and interaction with the environment. The description and the control of the non-linear, resistive switching electrical properties are demonstrated by the development of soft mechano-responsive electronic switches and soft reconfigurable logic gates. These preserve Boolean functions classifications even under small mechanical perturbations, thanks to the redundant and adaptive connectivity of the gold networks. These results constitute a promising starting point for a fruitful combination of physical and computing intelligence directly integrated on soft systems to efficiently interact with the surrounding scenario.