Enlarge / A forest of false-colored silicon nanowires. Flexible electronics, which could be used to control flexible robots , depend on the ability to produce electrical circuits that can be repeatedly stretched and bent while remaining operational. Silicon is obviously one of the most important building blocks of modern electronics, but even when it’s shaped into wires, it isn’t very stretchy. Recently, theoretical calculations have indicated that it may be possible to stretch silicon nanowire by as much as 23 percent, depending on its structure and the stretch direction. This raises an obvious question: why haven’t we been able to do so? Recently, an international team of scientists and engineers have directly probed the elastic strain limit of single-crystalline Si nanowires. The team found that stretching the Si nanowires almost to their theoretical limit is possible. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Follow this link:
Stretching the limit of silicon nanowires for next-generation electronics