Technique could double efficiency of flexible electronics

"This new design is still pretty conservative," said Zhenqiang Ma, pictured, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "If we were more aggressive, it could get up to 30 or 40GHz, easily." The straining process is described by Ma as "similar to stretching out a t shirt". First, the researchers pull a layer of silicon over a layer of atomically larger silicon germanium alloy, which stretches out the silicon and forces the spaces between the atoms to widen. They then add a final layer of silicon, which allows the doping pattern to be stretched along it. "The structure is maintained, and the doping is still there," said Ma. He believes that using the material will yield flexible electronics with much higher clock speeds at a fraction of the energy cost. "The next step is to realise processors, radio frequency amplifiers and other components that would benefit from being built on flexible materials, but previously have required more advanced processors to be feasible," he noted. "At this point, the only limit is the lithography equipment used to make the high speed devices."