New Connections For Stretchable, Twistable Electronics 60
tugfoigel writes "Jizhou Song, a professor in the University of Miami College of Engineering and his collaborators Professor John Rogers, at the University of Illinois and Professor Yonggang Huang, at Northwestern University have developed a new design for stretchable electronics that can be wrapped around complex shapes, without a reduction in electronic function. The new mechanical design strategy is based on semiconductor nanomaterials that can offer high stretchability (e.g., 140%) and large twistability such as corkscrew twists with tight pitch (e.g., 90 degrees in 1 cm). Potential uses for the new design include electronic devices for eye cameras, smart surgical gloves, body parts, airplane wings, back planes for liquid crystal displays and biomedical devices."
Devices (Score:1, Informative)
not devises.
The Japanese are going to have a fit! (Score:0, Informative)
Screw body parts. Tentacles baby!
In Ken Macleod's "Newton's Wake"... (Score:2, Informative)
...a character has a pocket-sized screen that he enlarges by _stretching_ it. I think of this when browsing the Web on a mobile, especially iPhone-like devices with their stretching fingers-metaphor.
Stretchable slow electronics (Score:1, Informative)
The length of a wire is limited by the wavelength of the signal it must pass. The rule of thumb is that any conductor longer than 1% of that wavelength must be treated as a transmission line. A transmission line depends on its physical properties. If any of those properties changes then the characteristic impedance of the cable changes. When that happens, signals no longer pass as they should, they distort and reflect and generally provide misery.
With the above in mind, my WAG is that the clock rate of stretchable electronics will be limited to the low MHz.
Grammar Nazi (Score:2, Informative)