Fedder and colleagues published in Advanced Materials

Vice Provost for Research and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Gary Fedder, along with Professor of Mechanical Engineering Philip LeDuc, and Ph.D. student Naser Naserifar, published "Material gradients in stretchable substrates toward integrated electronic functionality" in Advanced Materials. Working with multiple soft polymer layers, the researchers increased the strain failure threshold of the substrate six-fold, enabling it to be stretched to over twice its length.

Abstract
The approach toward a stretchable electronic substrate employs multiple soft polymer layers patterned around silicon chips, which act as surrogates for conventional electronics chips, to create a controllable stiffness gradient. Adding just one intermediate polymer layer results in a six-fold increase in the strain failure threshold enabling the substrate to be stretched to over twice its length before delamination occurs.

Read the paper here.