A General Surface Swelling-Induced Electroless Deposition Strategy for Fast Fabrication of Copper Circuits on Various Polymer Substrates

A universal, surface swelling-induced strategy-based facile electroless deposition method is developed to prepare copper circuits on various polymer substrates. The circuits are grown on silver catalytic centers written in the form of set patterns, rather than via standard reducing material manufacturing, and can be easily erased and repeatedly deposited three times with only a 15% decrease in conductivity. Polymers with different hardness and flexibility are selected as circuit base boards. In addition to hard acrylonitrile butadiene styrene resins, a flexible polyimide-based copper circuit yields excellent flexural performance, whereas a stretchable silicon rubber-based circuit exhibits different response to different ranges of finger motions. These results demonstrate the significant advantages of this new strategy-namely, low cost, simple operation, and versatility, showing its great potential in the field of flexible electronics.