The manufacturing-friendly process could transform the wearables industry.

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a method to create flexible silicon based transistors in an affordable and impressively fast way.

The technique involves using beams of electrons in order to create reusable molds of the patterns that they want, in a manner that resembles using a very tiny knife to etch miniscule trenches into those patterns.

The result is a tiny, although not as tiny as the U.S. Navy’s single molecule design, flexible transistor that can transmit data wirelessly and has the potential to operate at 110 gigahertz.

Once this technique is mastered, this opens up immense possibilities: with its capacity to compute at mind blowing speeds, the wearables market could benefit immensely from this bendy discovery.

As per Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma, the lead researcher, it is possible to scale up the manufacturing process for a full-fledged mass production. Its applications, given its bendiness, is manifolds: manufacturers could, for instance, use rolling pins to stamp the patterns onto rolls of flexible plastic, which could be used extensively in the wearables market.

Ma and his team have published their study in Scientific Reports and have  gone on record to say that their process is ready for mass market application.

“We don’t want to make [flexible electronics] the way the semiconductor industry does now. Our step, which is most critical for roll-to-roll printing, is ready,” said Ma.