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Highly anticipated: For decades, wearable technology has meant stitching rigid chips into soft materials. Now, a research team at Fudan University has created fully functional computing circuits woven directly into fiber strands as thin as human hair – a step toward fabrics that can process data, sense their environment, and display information without any attached hardware.

The development, published in Nature, marks a milestone in flexible electronics.

Led by Peng Huisheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Fudan team has spent more than a decade rethinking how microelectronics might evolve once freed from rigid, planar silicon. Instead of mounting electronic modules onto fabric, the researchers turned the fabric itself into a computing substrate.

The key innovation is a fiber integrated circuit, or FIC. Traditional chips depend on flat, inflexible wafers; the Fudan team replaced these with elastic substrates capable of hosting resistors, capacitors, diodes, and transistors.

Once patterned, each substrate is rolled into a slender thread. A single fiber – roughly the diameter of a human hair – achieves a transistor density of about 100,000 per centimeter, comparable to the densities used in very large-scale integration for conventional processors.

Despite its size, each strand can handle meaningful computing tasks. A one-millimeter-long segment integrates tens of thousands of transistors, giving it data-processing capabilities similar to those of chips used in medical implants.

Longer fibers simply pack in more transistors. A one-meter strand could hold millions, placing it in the same class as a conventional CPU in raw transistor count. Future generations built using finer photolithography could push integration densities even higher.

Earlier generations of fiber electronics were limited to powering sensors or transmitting current. The new FICs go further, combining signal processing – both analog and digital – with neural-style computing capable of image recognition. In tests, these fibers performed comparably to in-memory image processors used in machine-vision tasks, signaling a leap from simple sensing to true computation woven into a flexible form.

The Fudan team subjected the fibers to more than 10,000 bending and abrasion cycles and evaluated performance after stretching them by 30 percent and twisting them at 180 degrees per centimeter. The fibers remained operational after more than 100 washing cycles and withstood temperatures of up to 100 degrees C. In a stress test, even compression under a 15.6-ton container truck failed to disrupt functionality.

This resilience enabled the integration of multiple subsystems – power supply, sensing, computing, and output – within a single fiber. The approach eliminates much of the bulk associated with traditional external chips and wiring, allowing textiles to function as independent systems rather than merely as carriers for electronics.

The work builds on a decade of incremental innovation. Fudan researchers have already produced more than 30 varieties of fiber-based devices, ranging from energy-storage wires to light-emitting and biosensing strands. The latest chip represents the convergence of these research lines into a single, scalable platform. Laboratory demonstrations suggest that early-stage mass production could be feasible using existing semiconductor infrastructure.

According to the researchers, flexible fiber computers could pave the way for next-generation smart textiles, virtual-reality garments, and even brain – computer interface systems.

Image credit: The South China Morning Post