Rapid thermal nanoimprinting on silk protein substrates for controlled degradation of transient devices

This paper reports a facile patterning technique for silk protein based transient electronic materials by rapid thermal nanoimprinting. The solubility of silk films strongly depends on the crystalline conformation of the silk proteins, which can be well tuned by thermal treatment. Compared with the previous methods, this approach mainly focuses on the combination of nonuniform thermal distribution and high precision nanopatterns formation, offering the ability to finely configure the degradation behavior of various functional protein nanostructure. It opens up numerous opportunities for manufacturing high-performance transient devices with programmable degradation rate.