These are just a couple of the applications that engineers are dreaming up for curved, flexible electronics. But up until now, there hasn’t been a viable method of mass production. That may change, thanks to a recent paper in Science Advances, which details an elegant method of wrapping traditionally two-dimensional electronics, mass-produced on flat, planar sheets, around curved surfaces.
“This is just like wrapping a candy sweet,” says co-senior author Xue Feng, a professor of engineering at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China. The wrapper is a 2D plane, he explains, but it can deform to hug a round candy.