IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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62 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2026 Flexible circuits have been around much longer than most folks realize. My friend, Dr. Ken Gilleo, unquestionably a technology forensics genius, unearthed a British patent issued to Albert Hansen of Germany just after the turn of the last century (Figure 1), which we can easily recognize today as an ancestral flexible circuit. We owe his creativity a great deal of credit for laying the foundation for countless electronic products in use today that employ flex circuits. Other investigators followed with novel ideas for using flexible circuits for myriad products over the ensu- ing decades. Today, flexible circuits are ubiquitous, and we own many more flexible circuits than we can imagine, as they now facilitate the manufacture and enhance the perfor- mance of a substantial percentage of products on the market, especially personal electronics. These indispensable electronic interconnec- tion devices are commonly made using either thin BY J O E F J E L S TA D, V E R DA N T E L ECT R O N I C S A RT I C L E Figure 1: British Patent 4,681 issued in 1903 to prescient German inventor Albert Hansen, shows a device that is conceptually and functionally indistin- guishable from basic flex circuits of today. Performance-enhancing Benefits of Flexible Circuit Technology