Among diverse nanomaterials, silver nanowire (AgNW) has reached a certain level of technological maturity, and numerous commercialized AgNW products are already on the market for research and prototype purposes. One of the potential applications for AgNW and its percolative form is in wearable electronics, owing to the superior electrical, optical and mechanical properties that arise from the material itself or the overall interconnected structure. For successful application towards wearable applications, constituent AgNWs should first have uniform and controllable properties. At the same time, it is preferential to develop relevant scalable fabrication processes, together with the verification of potential applications from a proof-of-concept standpoint. Based on these progresses, we summarize the recent developments in AgNW based flexible/wearable optoelectronic applications and foresee their future development.
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant (2017R1A2B3005706, NRF-2016R1A5A1938472, NRF-2016R1C1B1014729 and NRF-2017R1C1B1008847), the Global Frontier R&D Program on the Center for Multiscale Energy System (Grant No. 2012-054172), the Creative Materials Discovery Program (NRF-2016M3D1A1900035), the Nano-Material Technology Development Program (R2011-003-2009), the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIP) (No. 2017000910001100) and the Institute of Engineering Research at Seoul National University. S. H. was supported by the new faculty research fund of Ajou University and the Ajou university research fund.
