Twistable Stretchable Computers

Researchers keep making computer chips smaller and faster, but John Rogers is trying to make chips that can be "stretched, compressed, folded and twisted in different funny ways." A team led by Rogers, a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois, demonstrated a few years ago that bonding ultrathin strips of silicon—a brittle and fragile material—to ribbons of rubber could make silicon stretchable. Recently, the team has built working chips that can be folded like a sheet of paper but also stretched like a rubber band. "A different way to structure and package the circuits enables these properties. We are now in a position to build very sophisticated high performance circuits," says Rogers. His chips, 50 times thinner than a human hair, may come in handy in ultralight and foldable laptops or futuristic "newspapers" made of flexible displays. Rogers's group is currently focusing on biomedical applications. Along with neurologist Brian Litt of the University of Pennsylvania, they are developing stretchable patches that can monitor the brains of epilepsy patients. "You cannot put a solid computer inside a body," says Litt, but these bendable circuits are different. "The technology has the potential to revolutionize biological devices."