Imagine that you are wearing a shirt that feels like ordinary clothing, but you can obtain real-time data on your health and surrounding environment. The clothes can also automatically heat or cool down, and even push you local transportation, restaurant and attraction information during your trip. Going a step further, the same fibers could be used to treat neurological diseases or provide doctors with tactile feedback during remote surgery, which are becoming a reality.
A research team from Fudan University in Shanghai, China recently announced that they have constructed complex electronic circuits inside flexible fibers that are thinner than human hair, creating an ultra-fine computing thread called a "fiber chip." The relevant results have been published in the journal Nature. According to the team, this technology has been developed for more than ten years, with the goal of providing a truly flexible computing and sensing platform that can be mass-produced for wearable devices, smart textiles, and a new generation of brain-computer interfaces.
This is not the first time that smart fibers have appeared. The scientific research community has been trying to embed conductive and sensing functions into fabrics for many years to achieve more invisible and natural human-computer interaction. However, how to stuff complex electronic components into a space as small as cotton yarn has always been one of the technical bottlenecks. At the same time, although traditional chips continue to shrink in size, there is a natural conflict between their flat, rigid structure and soft fabrics, making it difficult to bend and twist truly "like cloth."
In order to break through this limitation, the Fudan team abandoned the idea of "sticking" electronic components on the surface of textiles, and instead used lamination and spiral winding structures to build three-dimensional circuits inside ultra-fine fibers. Under this architecture, the researchers integrated about 10,000 transistors into a fiber of only 1 mm in length, giving it a processing power roughly equivalent to that of a pacemaker chip. The team pointed out that if this fiber is extended to 1 meter (about 3.3 feet), it is expected to accommodate millions of transistors. The overall computing power can be comparable to that of a typical desktop computer, and these "computing units" still exist in the form of threads and can be woven into clothing.
Not only that, each fiber is also integrated with components such as resistors, capacitors, and diodes, forming a closed-loop hybrid system that can process digital and analog signals at the same time, making it not only capable of computing, but also capable of signal acquisition and conditioning. This means that future smart textiles are expected to complete data collection, preprocessing and transmission at the "single line" level, rather than relying on bulky external modules.
According to reports, the diameter of this fiber chip is about 50 microns, while the diameter of ordinary human hair is about 70 microns, so it is closer to conventional textile fibers in terms of vision and touch. Its highly soft mechanical properties are not only suitable for being made into clothing, but are also equivalent to the mechanical properties of soft tissues such as brain tissue, opening up space for its implantation applications in the field of neuromedicine. The research team pointed out in the paper that this material has outstanding performance in softness and biocompatibility and is expected to become a platform material for intelligent neural implants and other soft medical devices.
"The human body is mainly composed of soft tissues, so emerging fields such as future brain-computer interfaces urgently need soft and highly compliant electronic systems." Peng Huisheng, a researcher at Fudan University and one of the leaders of this study, said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency. According to reports, this technology is expected to be used to alleviate symptoms related to Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, stroke and other diseases in the future, or be integrated into precision equipment and used as a highly sensitive sensing element.
In terms of wearable applications, the research team has used fiber chips to create a "smart tactile glove." Chen Peining from the Institute of Fiber Materials and Devices of Fudan University said that this type of gloves looks and feels the same as ordinary fabrics, but can sense and simulate the touch of different objects. In remote robotic surgery scenarios, doctors wearing such gloves are expected to "feel" differences in tissue hardness, thereby obtaining more intuitive tactile feedback during remote operations.
The scientific research team also emphasized that for laboratory prototypes to move towards real applications, they must also solve the problems of large-scale manufacturing and durability. To this end, they adopt a process technology that is highly compatible with the existing chip industry and claim to have achieved mass production of fiber chips. In tests simulating daily use, the fibers survived more than 10,000 bending and friction cycles and remained functional; in tensile tests, the fibers withstood approximately 30% elongation and could easily twist. In addition, it has withstood 100 times of water washing, as well as pressure tests of approximately 100 degrees Celsius and the equivalent of a 15.6-ton truck ballast.
Currently, the research team is cooperating with hospitals to transform fiber chip technology into cardiovascular surgery and explore its possible application in catheters, stents or surgical auxiliary means. "We hope that one day electronic fabrics based on 'fiber chips' will be able to exchange information as efficiently as today's mobile phones and computers," Chen Peining said.