New Connections For Stretchable, Twistable Electronics

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

[Anonymous Coward]

not devises.

Re:

[ATMD]

No, Devizes [google.co.uk]. A small English town well-known for its high population of bioscientists :)

For every day purposes

[WindowlessView]

Does this make it less likely that my headphone wires won't automatically seek to form the most complex DNA strands in the universe?

Re:For every day purposes

[dov_0]

No, but it will be possible to get the twists even tighter...

Re:

[MikeUW]

Serously - why did the above get modded as a troll?

Re:

[philspear]

No, but there's a simple solution to that: stop wrapping your headphone wires around histones.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Well tell him to stop sticking his stones right in front of my wires.

Re:

[TheGavster]

Hey, the nerdliest of headphone designers may make great sound, but their options for replicating their DNA leave them limited to the more eccentric solutions.

Re:

[timeOday]

Think bigger - let's use this to eliminate headphone wires altogether. Instead, the mp3 player is two globs of clay you squish into your ears for maximum sound isolation. You skip to the next song by gesturing with your head twice to the right as if to say, "move along."

Re:

[ani23]

two globs of clay easy to lose if one drops off straight through the subway grille. they need something to tether to. using head bad idea. not to mention you would look stupid. will have unintentional skips. repetitive stress injury lawsuits. try again

Re:

[GigaplexNZ]

I apologise for replying to a blatant troll, but perhaps the reason the Negro population have a lower IQ is because due to the discrimination in the past they weren't allowed a higher education? Cutting someones legs off and then claiming they are genetically inferior because they can't run very fast is pure ignorance.

One size

[gsgriffin]

fits all...now goes electronic!

Re:

[myxiplx]

What you need is a stuff bag, something I had the idea for after reading this:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=401814&cid=21857590 [slashdot.org]

Re:

[persicom]

Here's some advice for you: The quote is:

Leave the gun; take the cannoli

No true Italian says "cannolis"

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Those homonyms are a bitch aren't they?

Re:

[philspear]

In other words you want them to skip all the intermediate stages of development and go right to the end. Hmm... that actually does sound pretty good.

Attention everyone: notify me when they've cured cancer, figured out if global warming is real or a hoax (and if real have solved it), and they have MP3s that are thin as a card and rollable. Until then, I'm going to be pouting in my room.

Re:

[Arthur Grumbine]

I don't know about you, but my MP3's are already microscopically thin (the width of the bits on the platter)

Re:

[philspear]

I don't know about you, but my MP3's are already microscopically thin (the width of the bits on the platter)

Well, make it able to be rolled, cure cancer, and that global warming thing, and I might come out.

I did mean MP3 player I think...

and the makers of

[circletimessquare]

pornographic fetishware rejoiced

Re:

[Anthony_Cargile]

Same thing I thought after reading "stretchable electronics that can be wrapped around complex shapes". The glove comment also tipped me off, and I now fear that slashdotters may have an even lesser chance at obtaining a girlfriend with these devices floating around. Write an iPhone/Android app to communicate with it and human replication just took a massive hit!

Re:

[peragrin]

Ah have no fear, stupid people will find the devices to hard to use. and will continue to breed like jack rabbits.

Re:

[HTH NE1]

Someone will use it to try to create Terry McGinnis' Batsuit [wikipedia.org].

This'll fix coiled cables?

[BagOCrap]

Shouldn't this be used for every type of cables? During the last couple of weeks, coiled USB cables have given me lots of grief. USB connected camera stands (used for passport pictures) keep being disconnected, but as soon as the cable has been straightened (5 meters), everything's fine.

Recently I had the same problem with a Cat5e cable at some other place; 5 meters, half of that from the IP phone to the wall; as soon as I straightened it up, the phone was able to connect.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently I had the same problem with a Cat5e cable at some other place; 5 meters, half of that from the IP phone to the wall; as soon as I straightened it up, the phone was able to connect.

That's because the 1's get stuck in the turns but the 0's make it through just fine...

Re:

[noidentity]

Recently I had the same problem with a Cat5e cable at some other place; 5 meters, half of that from the IP phone to the wall; as soon as I straightened it up, the phone was able to connect.

That's because the 1's get stuck in the turns but the 0's make it through just fine...

Come on, no need to be so technically inaccurate in a forum like this! Inverted signaling is used, so it's the 0s that get stuck, and the 1s that get through without problem. Sheesh.

Re:

[KingAlanI]

An Intellectual Property phone?
Got Beckerman on speed-dial or something?
Also, Valenti & co - making crank calls is good way to bust stress if you manage to mask your caller-ID. Not that I would *know* about any of *that*. :cool:

Makes the space station wheel more likely.

[tjstork]

I thought one of the deals holding up the big wheel spinning in space for artificial gravity - like the station in 2001 A Space Odyssey was connections between the core and the spinning part. Maybe somehow this will help.

Why this is important research

[w0mprat]

Rolled up circuitry will allow for very dense electronics, which may turn out to be more practical than 3d-chips and other such advances. I've often wondered about finding a way to fold semi-conductors up like origami. If we are ever to have a nanotech revolution with smart machines tiny enough to float around our blood stream and other such applications for nanomachines, it's going to be necessary to package alot of processing power in to a small volume.

Consider that it is somewhat easier to print your circuitry in two dimensions, then to fold it up very small.

This is also helpful for making of smart materials, for example it'd be no use having a smart skin for a aircraft if fatigue and deformation destroys the circuitry within it.

Re:

[DMUTPeregrine]

Why just spin the wheel? Spin the whole station.

Re:

[KlTheKiten]

...because it's awfully hard to dock to a rotating station...

Re:

[GigaplexNZ]

The best way to make the wheel spin, without spinning the rest of the station, is using jets of something like air instead of a motor.

I disagree. I would spin two wheels in opposite directions such that the momentum would cancel out.

Re:

[celtic_hackr]

Right, a material that can stretch is going to be real useful in connecting to wires between a "stationary" object and an object spinning in multiple revolutions around said stationary object. Just like a rubberband on a toy airplane can stretch infinitely without breaking. Ugh.

NASA has known how to create AG at least 1952. A space craft designed to do this was to launch in 1977, but that program got scrapped. It is possible to created a spinning wheel around a stationary object. In fact you're using severa

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[kbrasee]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/25/slinky2.jpg [latimes.com]

The wi-fi slinky – so easy to use, even grandma's getting in on the fun!

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[StuartHankins]

Actually I wonder how well a helix would work for an antenna at certain frequencies... I know very little about antennae except some strange-looking designs sometimes work very well... the Hoverman for instance.

I'll have to go buy an old-school Slinky or two and play with it.

Re:

[Muad'Dave]

Helical antennas [wikipedia.org] are quite common. They provide acceptable gain, but more importantly they are circularly polarized which is a great boon for receiving signals from tumbling spacecraft such as Amateur Radio Satellites [amsat.org]. A strange instance of a helical antenna is the Quadrifilar Helical [no-ip.com] antenna. This egg-beater shaped beast is perfect for receiving circularly-polarized signals (from weather sats, for instance). I had one cut for 70cm on my roof for a long time.

So this means I can finally be Dr. Octopus

[kbrasee]

Oddly enough, I was watching Spiderman 2 at the dentist's office today and thinking, "What I wouldn't give for the stretchable electronics and semiconductor nanomaterials that would allow me to have sweet electromechanical appendages like Dr. Octopus..." And then I go on Slashdot a few hours later, and find that my dream will soon be a reality!

In Ken Macleod's "Newton's Wake"...

[John Guilt]

...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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Shock proof?

[john.picard]

I hope it prevents cell phones from breaking when dropped. Think of the effect that will have on landfills! Currently if you drop your cell phone, chances are some connection comes loose. Then the phone shuts down or malfunctions intermittently. What we need are electronic connections that don't break when a shock is received.

What cellphone

[Frankie70]

Currently if you drop your cell phone, chances are some connection comes loose.

What cell phone do you use? I have a cheap Nokia GSM phone - it's got a black & white screen,
no camera, no radio, no music player.
It's 2 years old - fallen on hard ground multiple times.
It's even fallen into a bucket of water ones.
It's working fine. Doesn't shutdown or malfunction.

Grammar Nazi

[Trebawa]

I know this is extremely grammar nazi-ish, but the article uses "e.g" where "i.e." is more appropriate. "e.g" stands for the Latin "exempli gratia", meaning "for example. "i.e.", on the other hand, stands for "id est", meaning "that is". Because the article gives the specific maximum values for stretchability and corkscrewing, rather than examples from a range of values, "i.e." should be used.

Tattoos!

[thered2001]

Blend this with the flexible display technology and you'll have something I'll be willing to have embedded subcutaneously. (But please don't add any 'enhancements' like GPS, ID verification, or anything which would allow the government to monitor my whereabouts.)

e-newspapers?

[ExRex]

Take a flexible OLED, back it with this flexible circuitry, add a flexible battery and you've got an electronic material which could really give paper a run for it's money. Is there flexible memory or storage yet?

Re:

[MrMista_B]

Well, I don't know about run for it's money. Can it be made cheaper than paper?

*That* is the true test.