My Country Has Developed The World's First Fiber Chip.

At the start of 2026, a seemingly insignificant yet groundbreaking news story quietly emerged: the team of Peng Huisheng and Chen Peining from Fudan University published their findings in the world's top academic journal *Nature*, successfully developing the world's first "fiber chip." This is not merely a technological iteration, but a "dimensional reduction attack" on the form of electronic devices.

The "flexibility" of smart devices has always been hampered by a key bottleneck: the chip, as the "brain," has long been rigid. The Peng Huisheng and Chen Peining team at Fudan University successfully constructed large-scale integrated circuits within elastic polymer fibers, developing a novel "fiber chip," providing a new and effective path to solving the "flexibility" problem. This achievement was published in the international journal *Nature* on January 22.

Traditional chip manufacturing primarily involves building high-density integrated circuits on flat and stable silicon wafers. The Fudan team's approach is to "reconstruct the form"-they proposed a "multi-layer swirl architecture." "It's like embedding a flat blueprint filled with intricate circuits into a thin line in a spiral pattern," explained Wang Zhen, the paper's first author and a doctoral student. This design maximizes the use of space within the fiber, achieving high-density integration within a one-dimensional, constrained dimension.

However, fabricating high-precision circuits within soft, deformable fibers is akin to building a skyscraper on soft clay. To address this, the team developed a fabrication route effectively compatible with current photolithography processes. They first employed plasma etching technology to "polish" the surface of the elastic polymer to a roughness of less than 1 nanometer, effectively meeting the requirements of commercial photolithography. Subsequently, a dense parylene film was deposited on the elastic polymer surface, providing the circuit with a "flexible armor." This protective film not only effectively resists the erosion of the elastic substrate by the polar solvents used in photolithography but also buffers the strain experienced by the circuit layer, ensuring that the structure and performance of the circuit layer remain stable after repeated bending, stretching, and deformation of the fiber chip.

The related fabrication method is effectively compatible with current mature chip manufacturing processes, laying a solid foundation for its transition from laboratory to large-scale fabrication and application.