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Increasing performance demands and shorter use lifetimes of consumer electronics have resulted in the rapid growth of electronic waste. Currently, consumer electronics are typically made with nondecomposable, nonbiocompatible, and sometimes even toxic materials, leading to serious ecological challenges worldwide. Here, we report an example of totally disintegrable and biocompatible semiconducting polymers for thin-film transistors. The polymer consists of reversible imine bonds and building blocks that can be easily decomposed under mild acidic conditions. In addition, an ultrathin (800-nm) biodegradable cellulose substrate with high chemical and thermal stability is developed. Coupled with iron electrodes, we have successfully fabricated fully disintegrable and biocompatible polymer transistors. Furthermore, disintegrable and biocompatible pseudo-complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) flexible circuits are demonstrated. These flexible circuits are ultrathin ( 2 ) with low operating voltage (4 V), yielding potential applications of these disintegrable semiconducting polymers in low-cost, biocompatible, and ultralightweight transient electronics.

The electronic properties of solution-processable small-molecule organic semiconductors (OSCs) have rapidly improved in recent years, rendering them highly promising for various low-cost large-area electronic applications. However, practical applications of organic electronics require patterned and precisely registered OSC films within the transistor channel region with uniform electrical properties over a large area, a task that remains a significant challenge. Here, we present a technique termed “controlled OSC nucleation and extension for circuits” (CONNECT), which uses differential surface energy and solution shearing to simultaneously generate patterned and precisely registered OSC thin films within the channel region and with aligned crystalline domains, resulting in low device-to-device variability. We have fabricated transistor density as high as 840 dpi, with a yield of 99%. We have successfully built various logic gates and a 2-bit half-adder circuit, demonstrating the practical applicability of our technique for large-scale circuit fabrication.