Researchers at Cornell University have developed a new method for remotely vaporizing electronics, giving the ability for these devices to vanish along with their valuable data if they were to fall into the wrong hands.

The ability for electronics to self-destruct is part of an emerging technology known as transient electronics—where key portions of a circuit, or the whole circuit itself, disintegrates or dissolves. Researchers say there are no harmful byproducts released upon vaporization, meaning it could be used in biomedical and environmental applications along with data protection.

How It Works

Previous efforts to trigger vaporization have used soluble conductors that dissolve when contracted by water, requiring the presence of moisture. Others disintegrate when they reach a specific temperature, requiring a heating element and power source to be attached.

Cornell engineers create a transient architecture that doesn’t have these drawbacks by using a silicon-dioxide microchip attached to a polycarbonate shell. Inside the shell are hidden microscopic cavities filled with rubidium and sodium biflouride—chemicals that can thermally react and decompose the microchip. The reaction can be triggered remotely by using radio waves to open graphene-on-nitride valves that keep the chemicals sealed inside the cavities.

“The encapsulated rubidium then oxidizes vigorously, releasing heat to vaporize the polycarbonate shell and decompose the sodium bifluoride. The latter controllably releases hydrofluoric acid to etch away the electronics,” says Ved Gund, a graduate student at Cornell’s SonicMEMS lab who led the research.

Researchers say the stackable architecture allows for small, vaporizable, LEGO-like blocks to make arbitrarily large vanishing electronics. This technology could be integrated into wireless sensor nodes for use in environmental monitoring such as being deployed with the internet of things to monitor crops or collecting data on nutrients and moisture. Once the task is completed, they vanish.

Other applications include embedding them in security applications or medical devices to prevent the theft of unwanted information.