World’s First Flexible Circuits

We already have flexible displays, so why not flexible circuits?

The first elastic, foldable, integrated silicon circuits could take previously brittle electronics to new locations, including the surface of the human brain.

John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, and colleagues made flexible silicon and plastic circuits that are just 1.5 micrometres thick.

“Making it thin makes it bendable, just as a piece of paper is bendable whereas a piece of wood is not,” Rogers says. The silicon in the circuits is just one crystal thick. Until now integrated circuits had been limited by a dependence on much thicker, brittle silicon wafers.

As well as being thin, the circuits are designed so that the plastic, and not the silicon, absorbs most of the stress when the chips are bent. The final product is a chip so flexible it can be folded around the edges of a US one cent coin, Rogers says.

From wearable gadgets to cyberbrain interfaces, the possibilities stretch the imagination.