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Zhang Tong

Chinese scientists have created fully flexible fibre chips with circuits that are integrated and embedded within stretchable strands as thin as human hair at a density rivalling those of a home computer’s central processing unit.
Scientists have now advanced fibre-based electronics that already enable power supply and sensing functions and have spurred the growth of electronic textiles by developing integrated circuits in threadlike form.
This allows the fibres to compute like chips or display information like transistors, effectively enabling machine-washable cloth to work like a computer or television.
The advance was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on Thursday. The study was led by Peng Huisheng, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at Fudan University in Shanghai.
The team developed a novel electronic device named a fibre integrated circuit (FIC). Instead of fabricating circuits on rigid planar substrates, the researchers built functional circuits on an elastic substrate, which was then rolled into a thin fibre resembling a scroll.
Although as thin as a strand of human hair, the fibre achieves a transistor density of 100,000 per centimetre, meeting the industry standard of traditional very large-scale integration while remaining fully flexible.

According to Chen Peining, from Fudan’s Institute of Fibre Materials and Devices and a corresponding author of the paper, at the present lab-scale photolithography precision of 1 micrometre, a 1mm “fibre chip” could integrate tens of thousands of transistors, with information-processing capacity comparable to that of certain medical implant chips.
“Extending the fibre to 1 metre could raise the transistor count to the million level, approaching the integration scale of classical computer central processing units,” Chen said in a Fudan University report.
“Nanometre-scale photolithography in the future would further increase integration density.”
The fibre itself can function as a complete microcomputer system, achieving a high-precision interconnection of electronic components such as resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors.
The photolithography precision reaches the highest level of laboratory-grade photolithography machines, according to the report.
“FICs can process both digital and analogue signals similar to commercial arithmetic chips and perform neural computing with high recognition accuracy, matching the performance of state-of-the-art in-memory image processors,” the team wrote.
The researchers said the FICs exhibited exceptional stability and durability under harsh conditions that bulky planar counterparts struggled to withstand, including 10,000 cycles of repeated bending and abrasion.
The FICs could also stretch by up to 30 per cent, twisting at 180 degrees per centimetre, as well as weather more than 100 washes, exposure to heat reaching 100 degrees Celsius (212 Fahrenheit) and even compression under a 15.6-tonne container truck, they added.
Based on this work, the team pioneered the integration of power, sensing, computing and display functions into a single, independent FIC. This allows future smart clothing and devices to function without any bulky external chips or wires.
“About 10 years ago, we had this idea of making chips into soft fibres,” Peng said in the Fudan report.
“It sounded interesting, so we started working on it.”

Over the past decade, the team has created more than 30 classes of functional fibre devices capable of power generation, energy storage, light emission, display and biosensing, with related achievements published in Nature on various occasions.
Now, the team has preliminarily achieved the scalable manufacture of fibre chips in the lab, suggesting that the infrastructure exists for mass production.
“This fully flexible fibre system paves the way for the interactive patterns desired in cutting-edge applications such as brain-computer interfaces, smart textiles and virtual-reality wearables,” they wrote in the paper.
For brain-computer interfaces, the researchers showed that this fibre technology could integrate sensing, processing and stimulation – including on-board signal preprocessing – into a single hair-thin strand.
The researchers described the system as matching the biocompatibility and softness of brain tissue without sacrificing the functional efficacy of commercial alternatives.
The idea is that fibre chips could turn ordinary clothing into interactive displays. For example, navigation could appear on a sleeve instead of a phone screen, or workout clothes could show real-time health data and videos.
In virtual reality, smart tactile gloves incorporating these FICs offer high flexibility and breathability, integrating dense sensing and stimulation arrays that can realistically mimic the feel of various objects. This could be used for tissue hardness perception in remote surgery or interactive experiences with virtual objects.


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China

Advance allows fibres to compute like chips or display information like transistors, paving the way for machine-wearable smart textiles


Advance allows fibres to compute like chips or display information like transistors, paving the way for machine-wearable smart textiles.


Chinese scientists shrink semiconductor chip into fibre as thin as human hair

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Advance allows fibres to compute like chips or display information like transistors, paving the way for machine-wearable smart textiles

Advance allows fibres to compute like chips or display information like transistors, paving the way for machine-wearable smart textiles