New chip fabrication technique points to incredibly thin, flexible computers

You only need to take a look at the hefty mainframes of the 1950s and 1960s to understand how quickly computers and electronics have been miniaturised, but there's room for them to go smaller still, if this new research is any indication. Scientists have come up with a new chip fabrication approach that they say could lead to much thinner and flexible computer chips in the future.

Developed by a team at MIT, it's the first chip fabrication technique where significantly different materials are deposited in the same layer. Today's computer chips, in contrast, are built from (very thin) layers stacked on top of one another, with precise patterns etched into them. The researchers say they've refined the process far enough to be able to build chips containing "all the circuit components necessary to produce a general-purpose computer".