A curvy, stretchy future for electronics

Electronics of the future will be soft and rubbery. Devices based on this new technology will be stretchable, twistable, and deformable into curvilinear shapes, thereby enabling applications that would be impossible to achieve by using the hard, rigid electronics of today. Examples range from ultrathin, conformable health-monitoring tapes that seamlessly mount on the skin, “electronic skin,” to advanced imaging devices that use hemispherical detector layouts, “electronic eyeball cameras.” In these and other systems, mechanical design will be as important as circuit design. Vella et al. (1) in this issue of PNAS introduce simple schemes to measure the mechanical properties of structures for stretchable electronics and they describe powerful analytical approaches that capture the underlying physics.