Photoinduced Tunable and Reconfigurable Electronic and Photonic Devices Using a Silk-Based Diffractive Optics Platform.

A remarkable feature of modern electronic and photonic devices is the ability to maintain their geometric and physical properties in various circumstances for practical applications. However, there is an increasing demand for reconfigurable devices and systems that can be triggered or switched by external stimuli to change geometric, physical, and/or biochemical properties to meet specific requirements such as compact, lightweight, energy-efficient, and tunable features. Here, a set of phototunable and photoreconfigurable electronic and photonic devices composed of reconfigurable arithmetic circuits and programmable coding metamaterials at terahertz frequencies, empowered by a diffractive optics platform using naturally extracted silk proteins, is reported. These protein-based diffract optics are precisely manufactured into special microstructures for phase modulation of incident light and can be programmed to degrade at controlled rates. This allows spatial and temporal transformation of the incident light into desired intensity profiles to modulate the electrical properties of multiple photosensitive elements/components within the device simultaneously or discretely. Thus, the optoelectronic functionality of fabricated devices can be tailored to specific applications. Therefore, the approach makes it possible to efficiently fabricate tunable, reconfigurable transient electronic and photonic devices and systems.