Stretchable electronics: materials, architectures and integrations

Abstract

Stretchable electronics, i.e. elastic electronics that can be bent and stretched, is a new, emerging class of electronics, based on building electronic circuits or devices on stretchable substrates. The potential applications range from fully conformable, stretchable, skin sensors for robotic devices, wearable electronic devices, to flesh-like biodevices. One of the challenges in the development of stretchable electronics is to retain full functionality under high external strains in stretching. In this paper, we review a few approaches recently developed for stretchable electronics and highlight recent research efforts on multi-directional writing for stretchable, three-dimensional structures.