Fiber Computing

Fibers are materials that have a very long length compared to their cross sectional dimensions, i.e. a very high aspect ratio. A wide variety of everyday objects are either made out of or consist of textile fibers (clothes, wall paper, chairs). In this work, we describe a potential physical layer for wearable computing by using fibers. The layer is defined by the fabrication of transistors onto fibers, packaging and integrating these packaged fibers into textiles. These fibers need be made out of suitable semiconductor materials to host transistors. A piece of polysilicon produced into a very small cross section compared to its length is demonstrated. Due to space constraints on a single fiber, research into novel architectures is done to create parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant and configurable devices. Configurable fibers can be interwoven into clothes or everyday objects to create artifacts, which can be interconnected with each other