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With the growing interest in wearable devices in recent decades, considerable effort has been devoted to developing mechanical elastomeric devices such as sensors, transistors, logic circuits, and integrated circuits. To successfully implement elastomeric devices subjected to large mechanical deformations or stretching, all the components, including conductors, semiconductors, and dielectrics, must have high stability and mechanical sustainability. Elastomeric conductors, which exhibit excellent electrical performances under mechanical deformations, are key components of elastomeric devices. Herein, we prepared fully elastomeric electrodes based on interconnected 2D gold nanosheets (AuNSs) to develop mechanically resilient integrated electronics. The AuNS elastomeric electrodes exhibited a sheet resistance of less than 2 Ω/sq under 50% stretching and sustained 100,000 stretching–releasing cycles. These electrodes with a dedicated design were used in combination with elastomeric semiconductors of P3HT nanofibrils in the PDMS elastomer (P3NF/PDMS) and an ion gel as a dielectric to realize elastomeric transistors, inverters, and NOR and NAND logic gates. Additionally, an elastomeric 8 × 8 transistor array that can sustain various types of mechanical stimuli was successfully demonstrated. Furthermore, the elastomeric electronic devices implemented on a soft robot showed no interfering performances during robot gripping motion. The proposed framework is expected to aid in the rapid development and broaden the application scope of soft electronics.

Wearable electronics demonstrate great potential for a wide range of applications, including electronic skin, implantable bio-medical devices, and health monitoring sensors. Such applications require highly stretchable and durable electrodes for adequate reliability and superior performance. Although extensive works on intrinsically stretchable electrodes have been reported, obtaining both mechanical integrity and electrical conductivity remains challenging owing to a trade-off effect. In addition, the lack of mechanical resilience to external stimulation of the stretchable electrodes has limited practical commercialization in numerous industrial fields. Here, intrinsically stretchable gold nanosheet (AuNS) electrodes with enhanced mechanical durability due to optimized hot-pressing fabrication conditions is studied. The AuNS stretchable electrodes exhibited lifetimes 8 times longer against repetitive sliding cycles under 88 kPa contact pressure compared to other hot-pressing conditions. Furthermore, the AuNS stretchable electrodes maintained a 5 Ω/sq. sheet resistance under 50% mechanical strain and 1000 stretch-release cycles. Application of hot-pressing to the AuNSs facilitated a firm contact between the AuNSs and hence they remained intact when stretched. Also, it is successfully demonstrated that AuNS stretchable electrodes can form a conformal contact with human skin and capture dynamic human bio-signals, exhibiting excellent performance compared to existing commercial wearable devices.