Silicon , silicon dioxide, and other materials typically used to make electronic components are intrinsically rigid and brittle. That’s a problem if you want to make a compact device that’s tough, flexible, or both. In principle, you could achieve that goal from stretchy organic materials. The trouble is, suitable insulators and semiconductors exist but not conductors.
The best commercially available conducting elastomers—rubbers filled with graphite particles—have a conductivity of 0.1 siemens per centimeter, high enough for them to work as antistatic sheets but not as elastic wires in integrated circuits. Silver flakes embedded in the rubber can also turn it conductive. But oxidation of the metal particles, electromigration, and a tendency for the conductivity to plummet when the particles separate under stretching make that approach also unsuitable.
To avoid those difficulties, some researchers opt to engineer conventional but rigid conductors into effectively stretchable ones. They face their own hurdles: Thin...
