Silicon chips go Gumby thanks to new stretchy circuits

The class of Professor John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has made some serious strides in the world of chip technology. One such advancement is that they now have IC's that you can bend and stretch instead of the strictly rigid chips that Silicon offers up.

You might be wondering why this is such a big deal since your motherboards aren't going to be coming in origami shapes any time soon, but it matters a lot in the medical markets. For years people have been striving to achieve some method to easily and conveniently get computers and chips inside the body if not to help keep things in order in the body, then to, at the very least, monitor bodily functions and especially such functions that occur in the brain.

The hard part has always been that even parts of the body that you might consider rigid are constantly moving, growing, or in motion, so rigid chips just wouldn't cut it. Now, thanks to this latest advancement, they can finally start working on integrating such devices into the human body. This technology could also affect the consumer electronics making even one more component just as flexible as the e-Ink displays themselves.

[via BBC]