Scientists say they’ve developed transistor-dense, flexible fibre chips as thin as a human hair, which can survive ‘crushing by a container truck weighing 15.6 tons’

A team of scientists say they’ve developed a new type of fibre integrated circuit technology, or FIC, with a potential integration density of up to 100,000 transistors per centimetre. The chip-integrated fibres are said to be as thin as a human hair, and can withstand repeated bending and abrasion, stretching, twisting, and even “crushing by a container truck weighing 15.6 tons”.

Their results have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, and the potential uses for such a thin, bendable, and resilient tech are legion (via SCMP). Beyond the possibility of creating fabrics where every fibre is its own miniature system, the scientists say that the tech could also be leveraged into brain-computer interfaces.

The study into the fabric-like tech was led by Professor Huisheng Peng at Fudan University. The researchers built circuits onto an elastic substrate, before rolling it into a thin, resilient fibre which can function as a complete microcomputer system.

“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 study claims.

And while the technology sounds impressive now, it seems to be at the limits of what current laboratory photolithography can provide. At present, a 1 mm fibre chip can potentially integrate tens of thousands of transistors, equalling the capacity of some medical implant chips, the scientists claim.

But study co-author Peining Chen says that “nanometre-scale photolithography in the future would further increase integration density”, with the potential for future iterations to begin “approaching the integration scale of classical computer central processing units”, according to the South China Morning Post.

So, could your next gaming CPU be integrated into a blanket? Nope. It seems we’re still a long way off. However, resilient, flexible technology is cropping up in all sorts of places, and it’s emerging tech like this that makes me think that perhaps the future isn’t looking so doom and gloom after all.

Ah, who am I kidding? It’ll take more than a chip in my sweater fabric to convince me of that, but it’s all very intriguing, isn’t it? And if anyone from the team is reading, the next time you crush one of these fibres under a 15.6 ton truck, I’d like to be there. I’ll bring my own popcorn, I promise.