Transparent and flexible film for shielding electromagnetic interference

Highlights: • By employing plasma treatment and electroless plating, copper network could be formed on silver nanowires/polyimide composite. • Semi-transparent and flexible film for shielding electromagnetic interference could be fabricated. • Shielding effectiveness of the fabricated copper/silver nanowires/polyimide film was measured to be 55 dB up to 1.5 GHz. The miniaturization of components in modern electronics has made them more susceptible to electromagnetic interference (EMI); therefore, this study proposes a new low-cost method for fabricating highly efficient shielding materials. This approach uses a low cost combination of inverted layer processing of silver nanowires (AgNWs) to produce a conductive network in a polyimide surface, followed by electroless plating of Cu to further enhance conductivity. This results in a highly efficient (> 55 dB) EMI shielding film that is less than 10 μm thick, transparent (> 58% transmittance), and sufficiently flexible to maintain its conductivity after bending to a radius of 3 mm for 10,000 times.