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Electronic devices are no longer limited to conventional systems with a screen, keyboard and processing components. Over the past decades, some electronics engineers have been developing thin electronic fibers that could be used to create wearable devices or flexible sensors for robots.

Despite their potential, electronic fibers can be difficult to assemble reliably into components or devices for specific applications. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at Donghua University in China introduced a new manufacturing method to build customizable circuits directly inside electronic fibers.

"This work grew out of a simple question: Can a soft fiber be more than a carrier for electronics and instead become the circuit itself?" Hengda Sun, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. "For embodied intelligence, electronic systems need to conform to complex, moving robot bodies while combining sensing, information processing and interaction."

Some conventional approaches for creating electronic textiles entail attaching rigid chips or individual electronic components to soft substrates. These strategies can create a mechanical mismatch and yield weak interconnections between components.

"Existing fiber-integration methods can also be constrained by materials and processing conditions," said Sun. "Our objective was to develop a manufacturing route in which material arrangement, device architecture and electrical interconnection are created together during fiber formation.

"We wanted to translate a circuit layout into a programmable spinning process so that the fiber is formed at the same time as the circuit is built inside it.

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