Researchers develop self-healing electronics, adamantium sadly not included

In today's feature-laden electronics devices, the failure of one little electronic component can scuttle the entire package. To make matters worse, if the damage happens to strike something like a multilayer integrated circuit, then you pretty much need to replace the whole computer chip. But what if the chip could repair itself like a certain vertically challenged Canadian mutant? That's exactly what researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign managed to do after placing self-healing polymers on top of a gold circuit. Once a break occurred, microcapsules with liquid metal filled the crack and restored 99 percent of conductivity in mere microseconds. Self-healing electronics would especially be helpful on things like aircraft, where miles of conductive wires can make finding a break difficult, researchers said. The research is just the latest in a field that also has seen self-healing sensors and shape-memory polymers, but sadly, there's still no word on using this stuff to self-heal a broken heart....

Researchers develop self-healing electronics, adamantium sadly not included originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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