China's hair-thin chip can survive being run over by a 15.6-ton truck

Researchers at Fudan University in China have developed an ultra-thin, flexible chip fiber as thin as a human hair, capable of being woven into fabric or implanted in the body without damage. Unlike traditional rigid silicon chips, this new chip is created by first producing a near-perfectly flat, stretchable polymer sheet with less than 1 nanometer roughness, on which standard chip components like transistors and capacitors are fabricated. The sheet is then rolled into a tight spiral, sealed, and coated with a protective polymer layer, resulting in a durable fiber chip that can withstand extreme bending, twisting, stretching, abrasion, washing, and even being run over by a 15.6-ton truck. This fiber chip contains about 100,000 transistors per centimeter, making one meter roughly equivalent in processing power to a traditional CPU. It supports both digital and analog signals and can perform simple neural-network style image recognition. Its robustness and flexibility open up new possibilities for wearable technology that processes data locally without