FiberCircuits: A Miniaturization Framework To Manufacture Fibers That Embed Integrated Circuits
Name
3746059.3747802.pdf
Size
12.53 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ceded26d300b74d6751a97a7ac7a35f0
Author(s)
Honnet, Cedric
Babatain, Wedyan
Luo, Yiyue
Kilic Afsar, Ozgun
Bensahel, Chloe
Nicita, Sarah
Zhu, Yunyi
Danielescu, Andreea
Gershenfeld, Neil
Paradiso, Joseph
Date Issued
September 27, 2025
Publisher
ACM|The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Citation
While electronics miniaturization has propelled the evolution of technology from desktops to compact wearables, most devices are still rigid and bulky, often leading to abandonment. To enable interfaces that can truly disappear and seamlessly integrate into daily life, the next evolutionary leap will require further miniaturization to achieve full conformability. With FiberCircuits, we offer design and fabrication guidelines for the manufacturing of high-density circuits that are thin enough for full encapsulation within fibers. Our demonstrations include a 1.4 mm-wide ARM microcontroller with sensors as small as 0.9 mm-wide and arrays of 1 mm-wide addressable LEDs, which were woven into our interactive textiles. We provide example applications from fitness to VR, and propose a scalable fabrication process to enable large-scale deployment. To accelerate future research in HCI, we also made our platform Arduino-compatible, created custom libraries, and open-sourced all the materials. Finally, our technical characterizations demonstrate FiberCircuits’ durability, thanks to its silicone encapsulation for waterproofness and braiding for robustness. From wearables to insertables or even implantables, we believe that by making miniature circuits accessible to researchers and beyond, FiberCircuits will open possibilities for new scalable interfaces that embody imperceptible computing.
Version
Final published version
Description
UIST ’25, Busan, Republic of Korea
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747802
