By Peter Weiss
Someday, the very fabric of your shirt might contain flexible electronic devices that monitor your vital signs or enable you to dial in the color or pattern you want to wear that day. Futuristic clothing of this sort may be closer to your closet now that researchers have developed a type of transistor-on-a-fiber.
Josephine B. Lee and Vivek Subramanian of the University of California, Berkeley say that the perpendicular arrangement of a fabric’s fibers should make it possible to wire transistors such as these new fiber ones into sensing devices, wearable displays, and other electronic devices. Conductive wires among the fabric’s threads would provide the transistor-to-transistor links.