Imagine a tiled surface, where the tiles are conductive but the grout is not. So you have islands of conductive material which don't connect to each other. If y

Imagine a tiled surface, where the tiles are conductive but the grout is not. So you have islands of conductive material which don't connect to each other. If you shrink that very small, and make it flexible and sticky, it's useful: Suppose you have a glass LCD panel, like the kind used in clocks and watches. The traces are indium-tin-oxide (ITO), on the glass. This is fiendishly difficult to connect to, it doesn't take solder well, etc. And you want to connect it to some flexible ribbon cable which will carry the signals to the control board. But how to do that? With Z-tape! By laying a strip of the tape over the ITO traces on the glass, and then smushing the flexible cable to it, the conductive spots in the tape now connect the cable traces to the ITO traces, without shorting them to each other.