Electronics can be made on elastically stretchable “skin.” Such skins conform to irregularly curved surfaces and carry arrays of thin-film devices and integrated circuits. Laypeople and scientists intuitively grasp the concept of electronic skins; material scientists then ask “what materials are used?” and “how does it work?” Stretchable circuits are made of diverse materials that span more than 12 orders of magnitude in elastic modulus. We begin with a brief overview of the materials and the architecture of stretchable electronics, then we discuss stretchable substrates, encapsulation, interconnects, and the fabrication of devices and circuits. These components and techniques provide the tools for creating new concepts in biocompatible circuits that conform to and stretch with living tissue. They enable wireless energy transfer via stretchable antennas, stretchable solar cells that convert sunlight to electricity, supercapacitors, and batteries that store energy in stretchable electronic devices. We conclude with a brief outlook on the technical challenges for this revolutionary technology on its road to functional stretchable electronic systems.

In the emerging field of soft machines, large deformation of soft materials is harnessed to provide functions such as regulating flow in microfluidics, shaping light in adaptive optics, harvesting energy from ocean waves, and stretching electronics to interface with living tissues. Soft materials, however, do not provide all of the requisite functions; rather, soft machines are mostly hybrids of soft and hard materials. In addition to requiring stretchable electronics, soft machines often use soft materials that can deform in response to stimuli other than mechanical forces. Dielectric elastomers deform under a voltage. Hydrogels swell in response to changes in humidity, pH, temperature, and salt concentration. How does mechanics meet geometry, chemistry, and electrostatics to generate large deformation? How do molecular processes affect the functions of transducers? How efficiently can materials convert energy from one form to another? These questions are stimulating intriguing and useful advances in mechanics. This review highlights the mechanics that enables the creation of soft machines.

Inorganic semiconductors such as silicon, gallium arsenide, and gallium nitride provide, by far, the most well-established routes to high performance electronics/optoelectronics. Although these materials are intrinsically rigid and brittle, when exploited in strategic geometrical designs guided by mechanics modeling, they can be combined with elastomeric supports to yield integrated devices that offer linear elastic responses to large strain (∼100%) deformations. The result is an electronics/optoelectronics technology that offers the performance of conventional wafer-based systems, but with the mechanics of a rubberband. This article summarizes the key enabling concepts in materials, mechanics, and assembly and illustrates them through representative applications, ranging from electronic “eyeball” cameras to advanced surgical devices and “epidermal” electronic monitoring systems.

Recent advances in stretchable electronics have seen the emergence of new technologies, and intensive efforts are being dedicated to embed some form of “intelligence” in various types of surfaces. However, the primary challenge in the field of stretchable electronics has been the development of stretchable or elastic electrical wiring that is both highly conductive and highly stretchable. Another challenge has been the development of manufacturing processes for integrating active device components as non-stretchable regions with electrical wiring as stretchable regions; the rigid/stretchable interfaces of these components require both high conductivity and high mechanical stability. In this article, we review the fabrication of carbon-nanotube-based elastic conductors with high electrical conductivity and mechanical stretchability as a representative example of stretchable organic integrated circuit electronics. Furthermore, we demonstrate the development of rubber-like stretchable integrated circuits for large-area human/machine interfaces. The fabrication process described in this article exploits the advantages of integrating a variety of electrical functional materials, ranging from rigid and semi-rigid elastomers to gels, with electronic circuits. The stretchable devices can be spread over a wide range of surfaces, including free surface curvatures and movable parts, thereby significantly increasing the scope of application of stretchable electrical and electronic circuits.

Stretchable electronics can go beyond what might commonly be considered “electronics.” They can exploit their inherent elasticity to enable new types of transducers that convert between electrical energy and mechanical energy. Dielectric elastomer actuators are “stretchable capacitors” that can offer muscle-like strain and force response to an applied voltage. As generators, dielectric elastomers offer the promise of energy harvesting with few moving parts. Power can be produced simply by stretching and contracting a relatively low-cost rubbery material. This simplicity, combined with demonstrated high energy density and high efficiency, suggests that dielectric elastomers are promising for a wide range of energy-harvesting applications. Indeed, dielectric elastomers have been demonstrated to harvest energy from human walking, ocean waves, flowing water, blowing wind, pushing buttons, and heat engines. While the technology is promising and advances are being made, there are challenges that must be addressed if dielectric elastomers are to be a successful and economically viable energy-harvesting technology. These challenges include developing materials and packaging that sustain a long lifetime over a range of environmental conditions, designing the devices that stretch the elastomer material uniformly, and system issues such as practical and efficient energy-harvesting circuits.

In the past 15 years, stretchable electronic circuits have emerged as a new technology in the domain of assembly, interconnections, and sensor circuit technologies. In the meantime, a wide variety of processes using many different materials have been explored in this new field. In the current contribution, we present an approach inspired by conventional rigid and flexible printed circuit board (PCB) technology. Similar to PCBs, standard packaged, rigid components are assembled on copper contact pads using lead-free solder reflow processes. Stretchability is obtained by shaping the copper tracks as horseshoe-shaped meanders. Elastic materials, predominantly polydimethylsiloxanes, are used to embed the conductors and the components, thus serving as a circuit carrier. We describe mechanical modeling, aimed at optimizing the build-up toward maximum mechanical reliability of the structures. Details on the production process, reliability assessment, and a number of functional demonstrators are described.

Research in ABO3 perovskite oxides ranges from fundamental scientific studies in superconductivity and magnetism to technologies for advanced low-power electronics, energy storage, and conversion. The breadth in functionalities observed in this versatile materials class originates, in part, from the ability to control the local and extended crystallographic structure of corner-connected octahedral units. While an established paradigm exists to alter the size, shape, and connectivity of the octahedral building blocks in bulk materials, these approaches are often limited to certain subsets of the allowed perovskite archetypes and chemistries. In this article, we describe emerging routes in thin films and multilayer superlattices enabled by epitaxial synthesis aimed at engineering the octahedral connectivity—rotational magnitudes and patterns—to reach unexplored portions of the crystallographic structure–property phase space for rational materials design. We review three promising chemistry-independent strategies that provide a handle to tune the octahedral connectivity: epitaxial strain, interfacial control at perovskite/perovskite heterojunctions, and rotation engineering in short-period superlattices. Finally, we touch upon potential new functionalities that could be attained by extending these approaches to static and dynamic manipulation of the perovskite structure through external fields and highlight unresolved questions for the deterministic control of octahedral rotations in perovskite-structured materials.