Electronics on anything

There´s probably not much call for printing solar cells on toilet paper, but a method developed at MIT can do just that, if it´s ever needed. More to the point, oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD) could allow low-cost production of solar cells and other electronic devices on thin, flexible materials that other processes can´t easily handle. Miles Barr, a graduate student in the lab of MIT chemical engineering professor Karen Gleason, described the process at the fall meeting of the Materials Research Society, in Boston.