Carbon nanotube nets that form integrated circuits

To make stretchable electronics, engineers must start with materials that can tolerate strain. That's why the ability to endure being stretched is a sought-after quality in flexible electronics, especially for wearable and implantable devices for health monitoring and treatment. Researchers at Stanford University have recently designed and developed materials that can be used to make stretchable integrated circuits that are one-fifth the size of earlier versions and operate at speeds 1,000 times as fast. As proof of concept, they demonstrated a braille-sensing system that can read a whole word instead of just letters, as well as a micro-LED screen ( Nature 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07096-7 ). The team used carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the semiconducting material. Even though a single CNT is very difficult to stretch, a network of the nanotubes does the trick. "Our stretchable transistor arrays and integrated circuit have performance that's on par with commercialized flexible integrated circuits,"