A TRANSISTOR made only of fibre is opening the way to intelligent fabrics – to make clothes that could monitor the vital signs of athletes or rescue workers, for example, or simply be a fashion statement.
Existing electronic clothing usually consists of switches or lights woven into fabric and controlled by plug-in silicon circuits. Now Olle Inganäs and colleagues at Linköping University in Sweden have produced fabric in which the fibres themselves act as the components of a transistor.
To make it, Inganäs coated fibres in the conductive polymer PEDOT, or poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene). He then took two of the resulting…
