Researchers have developed a way to spin electronic circuits into individual fibres. Different versions lit up, processed signals, performed logic operations or sensed movement without contact. The work appeared September 23 in Nature Electronics.
Electronic textiles have struggled to fit circuit-level functions inside individual fibres. Unstable connections and unused fibre capacity are part of the problem. In the new process, microfluidic spinning arranges conductive and functional layers as it makes a continuous soft fibre. Changing the arrangement creates modules with different circuit functions.
The researchers demonstrated light-emitting fibres, resistor-and-capacitor fibres for analogue signal processing, and fibres containing organic electrochemical transistors for logic operations. Another version used electro-quasistatic sensing to detect movement and enable touchless control. The fibres could be woven or sewn into textiles and withstood repeated deformation and washing in the reported tests. Those prototype tests do not establish a long-term clothing lifetime or mass-production reliability.
Sources
- Sun et al., “Programmable spinning of integrated circuit fibres,” Nature Electronics (September 23, 2026)
- Illustrative photograph of an earlier electronic textile, not the study's fibres: Plusea, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
