Curved electronics

A lot of my recent research has been on creating optics that can "see" over a wide field-of-view. The main issue is that for conventional electronics, projecting a wide FOV onto a planar imaging sensor creates perspective distortions.

This disadvantage is only one of many that exist with traditional circuitry, since we are restricted to electronics that are created on flat silicon sheets.

Curved, stretchable electronics are coming though.

Prof John Rogers of UIUC and Prof George Whitesides of Harvard have started a company to build curved electronics. If you have seen their papers, then you'll know they have already got a number of interesting applications, such as a curved image sensor to remove spherical distortions.

My interest is in how these will enable flexible, miniature sensors. For now, however, the size of each sensing element ("pixel") is much larger than what we can get with flat CCDs. Hopefully these will reduce over time.