A polymer is described that is conductive and stretchable, which can lead to electronics that can conform to the human body.

Trapping polymers to improve flexibility: Polymer molecules at a free surface or trapped in thin layers or tubes will show different properties from those of the bulk. Confinement can prevent crystallization and oddly can sometimes give the chains more scope for motion. Xu et al. found that a conducting polymer confined inside an elastomer—a highly stretchable, rubber-like polymer—retained its conductive properties even when subjected to large deformations (see the Perspective by Napolitano). Science , this issue p. 59 ; see also p. 24

Precision amplifiers dominate the power dissipation in most high-speed pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). We propose a digital background calibration technique as an enabling element to replace precision amplifiers by simple power-efficient open-loop stages. In the multibit first stage of a 12-bit 75-MSamples/s proof-of-concept prototype, we achieve more than 60% residue amplifier power savings over a conventional implementation. The ADC has been fabricated in a 0.35-μm double-poly quadruple-metal CMOS technology and achieves typical differential and integral nonlinearity within 0.5 LSB and 0.9 LSB, respectively. At Nyquist input frequencies, the measured signal-to-noise ratio is 67 dB and the total harmonic distortion is -74 dB. The IC consumes 290 mW at 3 V and occupies 7.9 mm ² .