These days when someone mentions silicon, we often refer this to a heap of money to pay for surgery enhancing certain parts of the female body! However, silicon is also a useful material in the technological world and not just specific to enhancing your best assets.
Normally the silicon chips are fragile and brittle to the touch. The new silicon chips have been designed to stretch and bend, making them flexible and introducing the next generation of stretchy electronic circuits. This is the first step into producing products that can be used for a number of health devices.
The tricky part to designing this circuit board was developing the wafer thin silicon material to become flexible, let alone producing an entire circuit that was thin in its entirety. The chip performs in the same way as a conventional piece of electronic circuit; the difference is its size and material.
Generally, silicon is a very fragile, which made it unappealing to use for most biomedical applications such as biomedical implants. Developing the new circuit has made it possible to ensure that electronic circuits can be used in biomedicine, giving rise to the opportunity of building advanced brain implants, health monitors and smart clothing. This bendable circuit can also be used in hospitals and aircrafts.
The new chip is only one and a half microns thick (millionths of a metre), which in comparison to standard silicon chips in PCs is hundreds of times thinner and still functions in the same way.
Researchers are ambitious in their approaches for using the chip. One possible approach is to use the chip on the surface of the brain to monitor brain activity on epileptic patients. Other collaborations have sought to install the chips on latex gloves to measure blood oxygen levels and patients vital signs during an operation.
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