UM Researchers Create Twisting, Bendable Electronics

Semiconductor nanomaterials have helped researchers at the University of Miami, led by College of Engineering professor Jizhou Song, devise a new class of electronic equipment, one that will feature, in the future, devices that can bend and twist at very large angles, to benefit a variety of fields. University of Illinois professor John Rogers and Northwestern University professor Yonggang Huang have also been working on the research. The electronics they've invented thus far can be twisted in intricate shapes, without losing their properties, and without damage to how they perform their tasks.

If the new technology goes popular, then we could see a lot of sectors benefiting from the new design. For example, medical gloves could be endowed with this type of sensors, which could help surgeons generate computer models of what they are doing, or even operate a robotic arm from miles away. Improved prosthetics could also become possible, and they would be made of materials that can thoroughly mimic the properties of, say, a finger or hip joint, which current artificial limbs cannot do.

"Our design is of great interest, because the requirements for complex shapes that can function during stretching, compression, bending, twisting and other types of extreme mechanical deformation are impossible to satisfy with conventional technology," Song says.

The noncoplanar mesh design, on which the researchers' creation is based, is actually simpler than it sounds. Instead of using a single silicone (SI) board to build the circuits on, they employ tiny "islands" of the chemicals, bonded together by a pre-strained elastomeric substrate. When the tension in this substrate is released, the very small metal wires that keep the islands together curve, and shape it like an arc. This allows for the deformations that are impossible with current building techniques.

The study appears on the cover of the December issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and is entitled "Materials and Noncoplanar Mesh Designs for Integrated Circuits with Linear Elastic Responses to Extreme Mechanical Deformations." Critics say that the paper could open up new avenues for the creation of sophisticated electronics that were only dreamt of a few years ago.