Our brain runs an astonishingly powerful supercomputer on roughly the same electrical power as a dim 20-watt refrigerator bulb, all because its billions of neurons calculate and store memories in the very same physical space. Modern computers, by contrast, burn enormous amounts of electricity constantly shuttling data back and forth between separate processor and memory units across a motherboard.
While engineers have tried to fix this data bottleneck by building artificial synapses out of rigid silicon and heavy metals, these chips demand energy-hungry fabrication cleanrooms and eventually add to the millions of tons of non-recyclable electronic waste discarded every year.
Now, Prof. Yang Li at Suzhou University of Science and Technology and his co-workers have built a flexible and ultra-fast artificial synapse printed entirely from room-temperature liquid inks that dissolves on demand in six minutes. Detailed in the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing , the work shows that high-performance and brain-inspired hardware does not require extreme vacuum chambers, rare metals, or permanent electronic waste.
Making computing components out of soft, carbon-based molecules has long been held back by a stubborn material conflict: soft organic compounds are naturally poor conductors of electricity, and past efforts to speed them up always forced engineers back to rigid metal plates deposited in vacuum chambers.
Prof. Li’s team bypassed this trade-off by assembling organic porphyrin molecules into a rigid and two-dimensional lattice known as a hydrogen-bonded organic framework, or TCPP-HOF. In this material, hydrogen bonds act like microscopic structural beams, locking the molecules into flat sheets stacked just 0.35 nanometers apart, roughly one hundred thousand times narrower than a single human hair.
This orderly architecture works like a microscopic turnstile that remembers every electrical pulse that passes through it. When a forward voltage pulse hits the sheet, electric charges slip into designated molecular resting pockets, paving a low-resistance path and raising the device's electrical conductance, much like a biological synapse growing stronger each time a memory is reinforced. A reverse voltage pulse draws those charges back out, resetting the connection. Because the molecular lanes are precisely aligned, this switching happens in just 26 nanoseconds, roughly twenty million times faster than a human eyelid can blink, while reliably holding ten distinct memory levels.
To test how well the hardware handles actual computing tasks, the team printed a 10 × 10 grid of these synapses on a flexible polyimine plastic base and ran it through standard handwritten-digit recognition trials. The printed hardware correctly identified digits with 97.23% accuracy, nearly matching the 99.24% theoretical ceiling of standard software running on conventional computers.
The flexible organic layers kept working even after the sheet was bent 200 consecutive times around a tight 5-millimeter curve. Once the device finishes its job, dipping it into a warm chemical wash breaks down the polymer base and framework into soluble monomers in six minutes flat, leaving only minimal inert residue.
For manufacturing, this solution-based approach means brain-inspired chips could be rolled out using conventional spray-coating and inkjet printers, skipping the multi-million-dollar vacuum systems required by silicon fabs. The immediate application lies in bendable medical patches and short-term wearable monitors that process health data directly on the body and dissolve when no longer needed. The researchers are now working on scaling up the 10×10 grid into larger crossbar arrays while engineering ultra-thin moisture barriers to keep the water-soluble circuits functioning reliably in humid outdoor air.
International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing (IJEM, IF: 25.1 ) is devoted to publishing articles of the highest quality and significance to pushing the limits of scales, precision, performance and environments in manufacturing.
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International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing
All-solution-processable hydrogen-bonded organic framework artificial synapse for neuromorphic application
10-Aug-2026