To appreciate why this is significant, it helps to understand what the Fourier transform does and why it dominates edge computing workloads. The discrete Fourier transform converts a signal sampled in time, such as a microphone waveform, into its constituent frequencies. This frequency-domain view is what allows a smartphone to compress audio, a radar system to form images of terrain, and a 5G modem to demodulate orthogonal frequency-division multiplexed data. For any device that senses the physical world and must act on what it senses, the Fourier transform is often the first and most demanding step of the processing pipeline.

The problem is computational cost. A direct discrete Fourier transform of N data points requires a number of operations that grows roughly with N squared, which becomes prohibitive for the large datasets modern sensors produce. In 1965, James Cooley and John Tukey introduced the fast Fourier transform algorithm, which recursively breaks a large transform into smaller ones and reduces the cost to a scale proportional to N log N. That algorithmic leap made large transforms practical, but it came with a catch: the fast Fourier transform is inherently a digital construction, a carefully orchestrated sequence of multiplications, additions and data shuffles that must be executed step by step on digital processors. Analogue hardware, which can perform many operations at once by letting physical currents and voltages do the arithmetic, has never been able to exploit this divide-and-conquer structure.

Analogue in-memory computing has matured rapidly in recent years, largely driven by artificial intelligence workloads. In this paradigm, a matrix of non-volatile memory devices stores numerical weights as physical conductance values. When input voltages are applied to the rows of the array, Kirchhoff’s current law sums the resulting currents along the columns, performing a matrix-vector multiplication in the time it takes signals to propagate through the circuit, with energy costs many orders of magnitude below digital hardware. Chips built on this principle have demonstrated impressive gains for neural network inference, but the technique has been confined to operations that map onto a single large matrix. A brute-force Fourier transform of the size needed for real signals would require a memory array containing a number of devices proportional to the transform size squared, quickly becoming absurdly large.

The Sandia-led team’s central insight is that the Cooley-Tukey decomposition itself can be reformulated as a sequence of matrix multiplications, and matrix multiplications are precisely what analogue in-memory arrays excel at. Rather than building one enormous array to represent the full transform, the researchers decompose a large transform into a cascade of smaller butterfly operations, each implemented on a modest array of memory devices. Intermediate results between stages are stored and routed in a way that allows the same physical hardware to be reused across stages. Because the total number of memory devices required grows only in proportion to N rather than N squared, the approach can scale to arbitrarily large transforms without impractically large or numerous arrays, preserving the essential complexity advantage that made the digital FFT famous.

The experimental platform is built on SONOS, a silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon charge-trapping memory technology that stores analogue weight values as trapped charge. SONOS devices are attractive for this application because they offer stable, programmable conductance states with good endurance and can operate at low power, even in subthreshold regimes. For the demonstrations, the team processed one-dimensional audio signals and two-dimensional image signals, performing precise analogue computations across up to 524,288 memory devices active at once within a single array. The audio experiments included computing a full 65,536-point frequency spectrum, a scale that rivals what dedicated digital signal processors handle in commercial systems.

The quality of the results matters as much as the scale. The researchers demonstrated that spoken audio reconstructed from the complex-valued transform outputs computed by the SONOS array remained intelligible, effectively closing the loop from analogue transform back to usable signal. For two-dimensional data, they applied a vector-radix fast Fourier transform approach, an extension of the Cooley-Tukey idea to multidimensional signals, to process images. Two-dimensional Fourier transforms are the computational core of synthetic aperture radar imaging, a technique used in Earth observation and defence applications, and the team’s simulations benchmarked the accuracy, energy consumption and performance of the analogue approach against established digital implementations, including a reconfigurable FFT implementation on a modern Xilinx Versal adaptive computing platform.

Analogue computation always raises the question of precision. Physical devices are noisy, drift with temperature and age, and cannot match the exactness of digital arithmetic. The research team addressed this with careful error analysis and simulation using CrossSim, an open-source accuracy simulator for analogue in-memory computing developed at Sandia, together with hardware-aware techniques that account for device imperfections during operation. Because Fourier transforms feed into downstream applications such as object detection or speech recognition, the ultimate measure of success is not bit-exact agreement with a digital processor but whether the transformed output supports accurate end-to-end performance. The experiments and simulations indicate that the precision achievable with charge-trapping memory is sufficient for demanding signal processing tasks.

The implications extend across a wide range of technologies. Edge devices such as sensors, wearables, autonomous vehicles and Internet-of-things nodes are increasingly deployed to sense and act on physical-world information, but they are constrained by battery budgets that digital processors strain against. Fourier transforms appear throughout these systems: in wireless communication standards that modulate data across thousands of subcarriers, in frequency-modulated continuous-wave LiDAR, in radar and in the spectrograms that feed modern speech recognition models trained on large-scale audio datasets. An analogue front end that performs these transforms at a fraction of the energy cost could meaningfully extend battery life or enable real-time processing that is currently impractical. The technique could also complement the growing interest in Fourier-based machine learning architectures, such as Fourier neural operators used for solving partial differential equations.

None of this means digital signal processors will disappear. Analogue in-memory computing trades programmability and exactness for efficiency, and hybrid systems that pair an analogue transform engine with digital post-processing are the most likely near-term outcome. Device reliability, manufacturing variability and the analogue-to-digital conversion overhead all remain engineering challenges. But the demonstration that the most important algorithm in signal processing can be mapped onto physical memory arrays, at a scale of half a million devices operating in concert, marks a genuine expansion of what analogue computing can do. Sixty years after Cooley and Tukey showed that clever mathematics could tame the Fourier transform, a new generation of hardware is showing that clever circuits can tame it again.

Subject of Research: Analogue in-memory computing implementations of fast Fourier transforms for energy-efficient edge signal processing

Article Title: Analogue fast Fourier transforms for scalable and efficient signal processing

Article References: Xiao, T. P., Feinberg, B., Richardson, D. K., Cannon, M., Madsen, C., Medu, H., Agrawal, V., Marinella, M. J., Agarwal, S., & Bennett, C. H. (2026). Analogue fast Fourier transforms for scalable and efficient signal processing. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01725-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01725-x

Keywords: analogue computing, in-memory computing, fast Fourier transform, SONOS memory, signal processing, edge devices, Nature Electronics, Sandia National Laboratories, non-volatile memory, energy efficiency, synthetic aperture radar, charge-trapping memory

The significance of the result lies in the tension at the heart of chip cooling. Water is, in many respects, the ideal coolant: it has a high specific heat capacity and excellent thermal conductivity, and embedded microfluidic systems that etch cooling channels directly into the silicon substrate have used it to dissipate heat fluxes as high as 3,000 watts per square centimeter. But water conducts electricity. In a device where coolant channels run mere micrometers from active circuitry, any leak, condensation or ionic contamination risks short circuits and catastrophic failure. Dielectric fluids such as HFE-7100, the fluorinated engineered fluid used in this study, are electrically insulating and therefore inherently safe to place in intimate contact with live electronics. The price of that safety has traditionally been poorer thermal performance, because dielectric fluids have lower specific heat and thermal conductivity than water.

The Peking University group’s answer is a geometric one. Their device, which they call a horizontal-up manifold microchannel cooler, or HUMMC, reorganizes the way liquid enters and vapor leaves the cooling structure. The manifold features horizontal inlets that facilitate liquid replenishment across the heated area, paired with vertical outlets that accelerate the evacuation of vapor. This separation of duties is crucial in two-phase cooling, where the coolant boils as it absorbs heat and the resulting vapor must be removed quickly to make room for fresh liquid. When vapor lingers over hot surfaces, it forms insulating films that choke heat transfer and can trigger the dreaded critical heat flux condition, the point at which the surface temperature surges uncontrollably because liquid can no longer reach it.

Manifold microchannel architectures are not new. In a conventional design, coolant is distributed from above through an array of alternating inlets and outlets, forcing it to flow short distances laterally through fine microchannels etched into the substrate before exiting. This shortens the flow path dramatically compared with a single long channel and boosts heat transfer coefficients substantially. The team’s earlier work, published in 2025, pushed jet-enhanced manifold microchannels cooled with water to an extraordinary 3,000 watts per square centimeter, a level comparable to the heat flux at the surface of the sun’s photosphere and far beyond what any conventional heat sink can manage. The challenge was to bring that class of performance to a dielectric fluid, whose lower heat capacity, lower thermal conductivity and poorer wetting characteristics make flow boiling far harder to sustain at extreme fluxes.

The horizontal-up configuration addresses the specific failure modes of dielectric flow boiling. Because the inlets run horizontally, liquid is delivered in a way that maintains a robust supply to the heated walls even as vigorous boiling generates vapor. The vertical outlets, meanwhile, give buoyant vapor a direct escape route, preventing it from accumulating in the channels and disrupting the liquid film. The researchers compared their HUMMC design against a standard parallel manifold microchannel configuration, referred to as SPMC in their thermo-hydraulic performance comparisons, and found the horizontal-up arrangement delivered markedly higher critical heat flux along with operational stability at the highest cooling loads. The combination of rapid replenishment and rapid venting effectively delays the onset of dryout, the local exhaustion of liquid that caps the performance of most two-phase coolers.

Two-phase cooling itself deserves explanation, because it is the physical engine behind these numbers. Unlike single-phase cooling, where the coolant simply warms up as it flows, two-phase cooling exploits the latent heat of vaporization. When the coolant boils, each kilogram of fluid absorbs far more energy than it could by a temperature rise alone, and the boiling process itself sustains high heat transfer coefficients at the wall. The trade-off is complexity: flow boiling in microchannels is prone to instabilities, pressure fluctuations and premature dryout, all of which worsen as the fluid’s surface tension rises and its latent heat falls, exactly the regime of dielectric fluids. Engineering the channel geometry to manage the two-phase flow, rather than merely to carry liquid, is therefore the central design problem, and it is precisely where the horizontal-up manifold makes its contribution.

The fabrication approach is equally important for the technology’s prospects. The cooler is built using microelectromechanical systems technology, the same suite of processes that underpins standard semiconductor manufacturing. That means the cooling structures can, in principle, be directly integrated with chip fabrication and scaled across wafers, rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Embedded cooling of this kind places the microchannels within millimeters, or even micrometers, of the transistor hot spots, slashing the thermal resistance between the heat source and the coolant. This co-design of electronics and microfluidics echoes a broader trend in the field: earlier landmark work demonstrated monolithic microfluidic cooling integrated into gallium nitride power electronics, and researchers have explored exotic substrates such as diamond and boron arsenide, materials with exceptional thermal conductivity, to spread heat before it reaches the coolant.

The motivation for such extreme measures is easy to find in the trajectory of the industry. Data centers powering artificial intelligence workloads are consuming electricity at a pace that strains grids, and a growing fraction of that energy goes into cooling. Wide-bandgap and ultra-wide-bandgap power devices, including gallium nitride transistors, concentrate heat into ever smaller footprints, and their reliability and lifetime degrade rapidly as channel temperatures climb. Defense electronics, radar and laser systems face similar constraints. Agencies such as the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have run programs explicitly targeting device-scale heat removal, recognizing that thermal limits now gate performance as surely as transistor scaling once did. A cooler that handles kilowatt-per-square-centimeter fluxes with an electrically inert fluid addresses all of these use cases at once.

The dielectric route also opens possibilities that water cannot offer. Because HFE-7100 and similar engineered fluids are insulating, they can be used in immersion cooling schemes, where entire boards are bathed in liquid, or in embedded systems where coolant contacts or nearly contacts live circuitry without elaborate sealing and isolation. The fluid’s low boiling point suits it to two-phase operation at temperatures compatible with silicon devices. The trade-off remains cost and thermophysical performance, which is why the demonstration of 1,570 watts per square centimeter with a dielectric fluid is more than an incremental record. It shows that with the right manifold geometry, the safety advantage of dielectric coolants no longer has to be purchased with a threefold penalty in heat flux capability.

There are, of course, steps between a laboratory demonstration and deployment in a server rack or a radar array. The researchers report operational stability at their highest cooling performance, and their comparison against representative two-phase cooling technologies, from spray cooling to pool boiling on enhanced surfaces to other embedded manifold designs, places the HUMMC at the top of the dielectric-cooled field. Scaling the approach to full-size chips, integrating the fluid delivery plumbing with real packages, and proving long-term reliability with fluorinated coolants are the natural next challenges. But the core insight, that separating horizontal liquid replenishment from vertical vapor evacuation unlocks dielectric two-phase cooling at fluxes once thought reachable only with water, gives chip designers a new tool at exactly the moment thermal constraints are tightening around the industry. As computing demand accelerates, the machines of the future may well be cooled from the inside out, by insulating liquids flowing through silicon labyrinths etched alongside the circuits they protect.

Subject of Research: Embedded two-phase microfluidic cooling of high-power chips using a dielectric fluid in a horizontal-up manifold architecture

Article Title: Horizontal-up microfluidics for embedded chip cooling with a dielectric fluid

Article References: Xiao, W., Wu, Z., Jiang, Z., Wang, Y., Wang, W., & Song, B. (2026). Horizontal-up microfluidics for embedded chip cooling with a dielectric fluid. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01724-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01724-y

Keywords: microfluidics, chip cooling, thermal management, dielectric fluid, HFE-7100, two-phase cooling, manifold microchannels, critical heat flux, embedded cooling, MEMS, Nature Electronics, electronics cooling

The standard remedy is to pair each memory element with a selector, a two-terminal device that conducts strongly only when a sufficient voltage is applied across it and remains nearly insulating otherwise. The quality of a selector is judged by its nonlinearity, the ratio between the current it passes in the on-state and the current it leaks in the off-state at the same operating conditions. High nonlinearity suppresses sneak paths, but achieving it without sacrificing drive current, switching speed or endurance has proved remarkably difficult. Threshold switches, ovonic devices, mixed-ionic-electronic-conduction devices and transistor-based access elements each bring trade-offs in variability, fabrication complexity or compatibility with the memory stack above them.

Against this backdrop, a News and Views commentary by Yuting Sun and Min Zhu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, published in Nature Electronics, highlights recent progress that may reshape the selector landscape. The commentary discusses work demonstrating tunnel junction selectors built from five vertically stacked layers of two-dimensional materials, a device architecture that delivers high nonlinearity, robust endurance, fast switching speeds and low device-to-device variability. The authors suggest that such devices could potentially function as a common access element across multiple memory technologies, a prospect that would simplify the design of hybrid memory systems considerably.

Two-dimensional materials, the family of crystals that can be isolated in layers only a few atoms thick, have long been touted for electronic applications because their surfaces are free of the dangling bonds that plague conventional semiconductors at scaled dimensions. In a vertical stack, dissimilar two-dimensional layers can be assembled atom by atom, allowing engineers to engineer the band alignment across the junction with a precision that bulk heterostructures cannot easily match. A tunnel junction exploits this control directly: the barrier formed between the layers governs quantum-mechanical tunnelling, so a modest change in the voltage across the stack can swing the current through many orders of magnitude. That voltage-dependent tunnelling is precisely the behaviour a selector needs.

The five-layer architecture is central to the performance reported. By sandwiching tunnelling barriers between conducting and semiconducting two-dimensional sheets, the device creates an energy landscape in which current transport is strongly suppressed at low bias but rises steeply once the applied voltage exceeds a threshold. The steepness of this transition determines the nonlinearity, and the atomically thin layers mean the effective barrier width is set with atomic precision rather than by the statistical roughness that afflicts amorphous oxide films. Because the layers are crystalline and their interfaces are abrupt, device-to-device variation, historically the Achilles heel of selector technology, is kept low. Variability matters enormously in practice: a crossbar array may contain millions or billions of cells, and the array can only be read reliably if the statistical spread of selector behaviour remains narrow across the entire population.

Endurance and speed are the other pillars of the achievement. A selector in a working memory must withstand billions of switching cycles without degradation, since it is cycled every time the adjacent memory cell is written or read. It must also switch quickly enough not to become the bottleneck of the memory operation. The commentary notes that the two-dimensional tunnel junction selectors exhibit robust endurance and fast switching speeds, indicating that the physical mechanism underlying the switching, governed by electronic tunnelling rather than by the movement of ions or the formation and dissolution of conductive filaments, is inherently less prone to the wear mechanisms that limit other selector types. Filamentary devices, for example, rely on stochastic ionic processes that both slow the switch and gradually rearrange the material, whereas a tunnelling barrier responds on the timescale of electronic transport itself.

The significance of the work extends beyond any single memory technology. Resistive random-access memory, phase-change memory, conductive-bridge memory and ferroelectric memory all require selectors, but each has historically demanded a selector tailored to its particular voltage window, current range and integration scheme. A universal selector, one device that can serve as the access element across several memory platforms, would allow foundries to standardise a single back-end-of-line module and would give memory architects freedom to mix and match storage elements within a system without redesigning the array infrastructure. Sun and Zhu point to this cross-technology compatibility as the potentially transformative aspect of the two-dimensional tunnel junction approach, framing it as a common access element for multiple memory technologies.

The commentary situates the new devices within a broader arc of two-dimensional materials research. Since the isolation of graphene opened the field, researchers have assembled van der Waals heterostructures in which layers are stacked without the lattice-matching constraints of epitaxial growth. Reviews of the field have emphasised that this assembly freedom, combined with the diversity of available two-dimensional crystals, from semiconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides to insulating hexagonal boron nitride, enables device concepts that are difficult or impossible in conventional material systems. The tunnel junction selector is a compelling example of that promise translated into a device metric, nonlinearity, that the memory industry can measure and value directly.

Challenges remain before such selectors can leave the laboratory. Integrating two-dimensional layers into large-area manufacturing remains an unsolved problem at scale, since the growth and transfer of atomically thin films over full wafers must achieve uniformity comparable to that of deposited oxides. Contact resistance between the two-dimensional stack and conventional metal interconnects, thermal stability during back-end processing, and the yield of defect-free multilayer stacks are all active areas of investigation. The commentary’s authors, who are themselves affiliated with a school of integrated circuits and a national key laboratory of micro and nano manufacture technology, are well placed to appreciate the distance between a demonstrated device and a manufacturable module.

Even so, the demonstration marks a notable convergence of two research communities. Memory engineers have spent two decades searching for a selector that combines the nonlinearity of a diode with the bidirectional operation and simple two-terminal structure that crossbar arrays require, while two-dimensional materials researchers have sought applications in which atomically thin layers provide a decisive advantage rather than an incremental one. The tunnel junction selector, with its high nonlinearity, robust endurance, fast switching and low variability, offers evidence that this convergence can produce devices that matter to the industry. If the approach survives the rigours of large-area integration, the humble selector, long an afterthought in memory design, may become the element that finally unlocks the full density promise of three-dimensional crossbar memories.

Subject of Research: Two-dimensional-material tunnel junction selectors for crossbar memory arrays

Article Title: Universal selectors from two-dimensional materials

Article References: Sun, Y., & Zhu, M. (2026). Universal selectors from two-dimensional materials. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01723-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01723-z

Keywords: two-dimensional materials, tunnel junction, selector device, crossbar arrays, memory technology, nonlinearity, endurance, switching speed, device variability, van der Waals heterostructures, Nature Electronics, resistive memory

The core of the innovation is a circuit architecture known as a parity–time-symmetric, or PT-symmetric, system. The concept entered the wireless power arena in 2017, when researchers showed that a nonlinear PT-symmetric circuit could maintain robust power transfer across changing distances without any active tuning. In such a system, the transmitter and receiver are coupled resonators whose gain and loss are carefully balanced. When the coupling between them changes—because the distance or orientation changes—the coupled system automatically adjusts its oscillation frequency to remain in the symmetric regime, and the transfer efficiency stays remarkably flat. In other words, the physics of the circuit does the compensation that engineers would otherwise have to perform with sensors, feedback loops, and adjustable matching networks. The new work extends this principle from rigid laboratory coils to the far messier environment of living tissue and deformable electronics.

The system consists of two halves. On the outside is a self-oscillating wearable transmitter, a compact unit that generates an oscillating magnetic field without needing an external drive signal locked to a fixed frequency. Because the transmitter is self-oscillating, it naturally follows the resonant state of the coupled system as conditions change. On the inside is a stretchable receiver built from liquid metal, a material choice that lets the implanted coil deform freely with the surrounding tissue without cracking or losing its electrical properties. Conventional receivers made from solid copper traces on flexible substrates can survive some bending, but repeated strain at the millimeter scale of a moving organ eventually fatigues the conductors. Liquid-metal conductors, by contrast, remain electrically continuous even when stretched, twisted, and compressed, which is precisely what an implant attached to cardiac tissue experiences continuously.

The significance of combining these elements is best appreciated by considering what happens in a traditional inductive link. The efficiency of near-field coupling falls off steeply as the separation between coils grows or as they drift out of alignment, and deformation of the receiver changes its inductance and shifts its resonant frequency. For a soft implant, all three perturbations occur simultaneously and unpredictably. Earlier battery-free implants, including the fully implantable and bioresorbable cardiac pacemakers demonstrated in 2021, relied on near-field inductive coupling that worked well under controlled conditions but demanded careful positioning of the external power source. The PT-symmetric approach reported now absorbs those variations into the circuit dynamics, so the power delivered to the implant remains stable even as the geometry of the link changes throughout the day and with every heartbeat.

To validate the design, the researchers moved beyond benchtop tests with artificial phantoms and into large-animal models. In experiments with rabbits and pigs, the wearable transmitter powered a soft implantable device well enough to pace the heart without wires or batteries. Cardiac pacing is an unusually demanding test case: the implant must deliver precisely timed electrical stimuli to excite heart muscle, the power budget is unforgiving, and the mechanical environment is among the most dynamic in the body. The fact that the link tolerated the combined effects of respiration, motion, and tissue deformation while still delivering sufficient energy for reliable pacing suggests that the variation-tolerance is not a laboratory curiosity but a property that holds up under physiologically realistic conditions.

The study also sits within a broader materials-science context that has matured rapidly in recent years. Reviews of soft bioelectronics have catalogued the design and integration strategies needed to build devices that conform to biological tissue while maintaining long-term function, and complementary work on stretchable hermetic seals has addressed one of the field’s chronic weaknesses: keeping bodily fluids from permeating into stretchable electronics over time. A liquid-metal receiver must be encapsulated so that neither the metal nor the surrounding fluids leak across the interface, and advances in viscoplastic sealing strategies have made such packaging feasible without sacrificing mechanical compliance. The power system described in the new paper is thus the product of converging progress in circuit theory, soft materials, and encapsulation technology rather than a single isolated breakthrough.

From a clinical standpoint, the implications extend well beyond pacing. Battery-free bioelectronics have been proposed for nerve stimulation, wound monitoring, drug delivery, and closed-loop therapies in which a sensor and a stimulator work together. Every one of those applications inherits the same coupling problem: the implant moves, deforms, and drifts relative to whatever external source powers it. A power link that is insensitive to distance, alignment, and strain removes a fundamental constraint on where such devices can be placed and how they can be designed. An implant no longer needs to be anchored in a fixed orientation relative to a wearable patch, which simplifies surgical placement, improves patient comfort, and opens the door to implants on organs that are in near-constant motion.

There are, of course, questions that must be answered before such systems reach routine clinical use. The reported demonstrations were in animal models, and translating to humans will require attention to the long-term biocompatibility of the liquid-metal receiver and its packaging, the thermal footprint of continuous power delivery through tissue, and the regulatory pathway for a wearable component that patients must wear consistently. The efficiency of any wireless link also depends on the power levels involved; pacing requires relatively modest energy, and applications with higher demands may stress the PT-symmetric architecture differently. The nonlinear dynamics that make the circuit robust also impose constraints on how much power can be transferred before the system exits its stable operating regime, a trade-off that future engineering will need to map carefully.

Even with those caveats, the demonstration marks a meaningful shift in how the field thinks about wireless power for soft implants. Rather than treating movement and deformation as disturbances to be minimized, the design embraces them as conditions the circuit is built to withstand. That philosophical change—designing for variation rather than against it—may prove as important as any single performance metric. If the approach scales as its animal results suggest, the combination of a self-oscillating wearable transmitter and a stretchable liquid-metal receiver could become a standard platform for powering the next generation of untethered, battery-free medical implants, bringing the vision of soft electronics that live comfortably inside the moving, changing human body considerably closer to reality.

Subject of Research: Variation-tolerant wearable-to-implant wireless power transfer for soft, battery-free medical implants

Article Title: Wireless power transfer that tolerates movement and deformation for soft implants

Article References: Wireless power transfer that tolerates movement and deformation for soft implants. (2026). Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01715-z (Author names are not included in the publisher’s citation export.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01715-z

Keywords: wireless power transfer, parity-time symmetry, soft implants, liquid metal, cardiac pacing, wearable electronics, bioelectronics, stretchable electronics, battery-free implants, Nature Electronics, biomedical engineering, resonant coupling

The core difficulty is familiar to anyone who has wrestled with wireless phone chargers. Conventional inductive coupling depends on two coils being tuned to the same resonant frequency, like two tuning forks sharing a pitch. When the coils are perfectly aligned and the load is steady, energy flows efficiently across the gap. But inside a body, nothing stays still. A patient moves, breathes, and shifts posture; the implant stretches with surrounding tissue; the electrical impedance at the implant’s output changes as it stimulates muscle. Each of these disturbances shifts the resonance of the system, and once transmitter and receiver drift out of tune, power transfer efficiency collapses. The result is an implant that works beautifully on the bench but fails unpredictably in the clinic, a problem engineers have documented since early analyses of radio-frequency coils in implantable devices in the 1980s.

The Korean team’s solution attacks the problem on two fronts simultaneously: the circuit architecture and the materials. On the circuit side, they built the power link around a nonlinear parity-time symmetric circuit, an approach first demonstrated for robust wireless power transfer by researchers at Stanford University in 2017. In a parity-time symmetric system, the transmitter and receiver form a symmetric resonator pair, and the transmitter continuously adjusts its own operating frequency to match whatever frequency the receiver settles at. Instead of demanding that the two coils stay perfectly tuned, the system lets the receiver’s resonance wander and follows it in real time. A feedback circuit in the wearable transmitter detects changes and provides automatic frequency adaptation, so that misalignment, mechanical deformation, or load impedance fluctuations no longer break the resonance that carries the power.

On the materials side, the implantable receiver is built from liquid metal. Rather than patterning the receiver’s coil and interconnects from rigid copper, the researchers used liquid metal conductors encapsulated in soft elastomers, fabricated through a multistep process involving photolithographically defined copper traces that guide liquid metal deposition, vertical interconnect vias etched through insulating elastomer layers, and off-the-shelf electronic components integrated onto liquid metal pads. Because the conductors are intrinsically stretchy, the receiver’s electrical resistance barely changes when the device deforms. That matters because resistance-induced losses are what erode efficiency in stretchable electronics: a conventional serpentine metal trace stretches by uncoiling and thinning, raising resistance and shifting the coil’s electrical properties. A liquid metal channel simply changes shape while keeping its cross-section and conductivity largely intact, minimizing resistance-induced power losses during deformation.

The performance numbers reported in the paper are striking. The system maintains power transfer efficiency above 50 percent even when the receiver is stretched by 30 percent or displaced laterally by 30 millimeters from the transmitter. For context, conventional inductively coupled systems can lose the bulk of their efficiency at a fraction of that misalignment. The team also tested the system under bending, tilting, and rotational misalignment, tracking both operating frequency and transfer efficiency through each disturbance, and compared the parity-time symmetric architecture against a conventional negative-impedance-converted system in simulations and in live animals. In those comparisons, the conventional system’s efficiency maps showed sharp drop-offs as separation and strain increased, while the parity-time symmetric system held a broad, stable operating range. A radar chart comparison against previously reported stretchable wireless bioelectronic devices, scored on efficiency, alignment tolerance, strain insensitivity, stretchability, and conductivity, placed the new system at the most balanced and superior overall performance among state-of-the-art devices.

The demonstration that turns this from an elegant circuit exercise into a potential medical technology is cardiac pacing. The researchers packaged the liquid metal receiver as a wireless pacemaker with electrodes made from a silver-gold nanowire composite embedded in an elastomer, designed to be sutured onto the surface of the heart. The wearable transmitter, powered by an 11-volt lithium-ion battery and managed by a microcontroller-controlled power unit, was mounted on the outside of the body. The received power is rectified on the implant and used to deliver controlled electrical stimulation to the cardiac tissue. Because the entire power link tolerates the constant motion of a large animal, the pacing could continue under highly dynamic in vivo conditions that would destabilize a conventional link.

In experiments, the team first validated the system in rabbit models, implanting the liquid metal receiver subcutaneously and using an LED indicator on the receiver to visualize successful power transfer as the axial and lateral separation between transmitter and receiver coils increased. The parity-time symmetric system maintained consistent activation across the tested positions, whereas the conventional system failed to power the implant at increased distances and lateral misalignments. The team then moved to a porcine model, whose heart size and physiology are much closer to humans. Fully untethered pigs with wearable transmitters attached to their backs received wireless epicardial pacing, with electrodes sutured onto the heart surface. The system not only paced the heart reliably but also terminated tachyarrhythmias, dangerously fast heart rhythms, under those same dynamic conditions, demonstrating that the power link could support not just routine pacing but active intervention during cardiac events.

The control side of the system reflects a deliberate design for real-world use. The wearable power management unit regulates power from the battery and provides regulated outputs to the transmitter circuits through a microcontroller-controlled switch, and the microcontroller was programmed using the Arduino IDE, with source code available from the corresponding authors. Smartphone control was implemented using a commercially available Bluetooth Low Energy terminal application, meaning a clinician or patient could in principle adjust the system with ordinary consumer hardware rather than bespoke equipment. That kind of practical engineering detail, mundane as it sounds, often separates laboratory demonstrations from technologies that can actually be deployed and maintained outside a research environment.

The implications extend well beyond pacemakers. Fully implantable bioelectronic systems, from neuromodulation devices and brain-computer interfaces to bioresorbable stimulators and injectable sensors, all face the same power bottleneck, and many of the most exciting recent devices in the field, including millimetre-scale bioresorbable optoelectronic systems and programmable ultrasonic implants, depend on some form of wireless energy delivery. A power link that tolerates strain, misalignment, and load variation could serve as a general-purpose energy backbone for soft, body-conformal devices that move with organs rather than fighting them. The authors’ comparison framework, scoring devices on efficiency, alignment tolerance, strain insensitivity, stretchability, and conductivity, also gives the field a clearer yardstick for evaluating future designs.

Cautious optimism is warranted. The work was demonstrated in animal models, and the path to human devices will require the usual gauntlet of biocompatibility validation, long-term reliability testing, and regulatory review; the liquid metal, elastomers, and nanocomposite electrodes involved have strong precedents in the soft bioelectronics literature but must prove themselves in chronic implants. Still, the combination of a self-tuning nonlinear circuit and an intrinsically stretchable liquid metal receiver addresses the two failure modes, resonance drift and deformation losses, that have most reliably broken wireless implants. If the variation tolerance demonstrated in freely moving pigs carries through to clinical devices, the era of truly untethered, maintenance-free implantable medicine moves considerably closer, powered by a transmitter you wear and a receiver that bends with every beat of your heart.

Subject of Research: Variation-tolerant wearable-to-implant wireless power transfer for implantable bioelectronics such as wireless cardiac pacemakers

Article Title: A wearable-to-implant wireless power transfer technology with variation tolerance

Article References: Nam, S., Seo, T., Yoo, S., Park, C., Kim, T., Yu, M., Kim, Y., Kang, H., Yeom, D., Cho, Y., Cho, H., Lee, D., Kim, J. H., Sunwoo, S.-H., Lee, S., Moon, J., Lee, S.-P., Kim, S., & Kim, D.-H. (2026). A wearable-to-implant wireless power transfer technology with variation tolerance. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01714-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01714-0

Keywords: wireless power transfer, parity-time symmetry, liquid metal electronics, implantable bioelectronics, cardiac pacing, stretchable electronics, wearable devices, resonant inductive coupling, soft materials, biomedical engineering, Nature Electronics, tachyarrhythmia

The key to the new platform is the integration of three functions on a scale measured in tens of micrometres. Each robot carries a temperature sensor, a programmable CMOS control circuit and arrays of electrochemical actuators that beat like biological cilia. The actuators are built from a titanium–palladium stack that bends when voltage is applied, driving ions into and out of the palladium layer and causing controlled bending at engineered hinges. Because the cilia are hinged, with two rigid panels connected by rotational joints, their beat cycle can be programmed to break the time-reversal symmetry that governs fluid motion at low Reynolds number. At microscopic scales, where viscosity dominates over inertia, fluid flows are reversible unless the stroke and the recovery stroke differ in shape, a constraint famously articulated in Lighthill’s analysis of flagellar hydrodynamics. The hinged design allows the robots to sweep the fluid with a fast, extended stroke and a slow, folded recovery, producing net pumping in a chosen direction.

Powering and controlling such tiny machines is a formidable engineering challenge, and the team solved it with microscale photovoltaic regions that convert incident laser light at 635 nanometres into electrical current for both the logic and the actuators. The binary sensing circuit switches its output phase configuration at threshold temperatures of 26 and 30 degrees Celsius, and can deliver actuation frequencies ranging from 0.4 to 12.8 hertz, with 1.6 hertz used for cilium beating in the reported demonstrations. The photovoltaic supply generates currents of roughly 0.78 microamperes at one sun of illumination, rising to about 4.8 microamperes at ten suns, enough to run the circuit and drive the cilia without any tether. This architecture builds on earlier work from the same collaboration, including electronically integrated mass-manufactured microscopic robots, cilia metasurfaces for programmable microfluidic manipulation, and microscopic robots with onboard digital control, but it adds something those systems lacked: a genuine sensory loop in which the robot’s action depends on what it measures.

The researchers demonstrated three distinct temperature-responsive modalities, each producing a different coupling between robot behaviour and environmental cues. The first is binary sensing, in which the onboard sensor acts as a threshold detector. Below the threshold the cilia pump in one direction; above it, the circuit reconfigures the wiring to the actuators and the pumping reverses. The team showed that this simple switch can reverse unidirectional flow, reverse the rotation of a single vortex, or reverse both vortices in a symmetric counter-rotating pair, all in response to nothing more than the ambient temperature crossing a set point. Because the flow patterns are generated by arrays of individually wired cilia, the same sensing principle can be routed into dramatically different hydrodynamic outcomes simply by changing how the circuit output is distributed across the array.

The second modality replaces the sharp threshold with continuous sensing, implemented using pulse-coupled oscillator circuits built from dynamic-leakage-suppression logic gates. In this scheme, the oscillation frequency of the onboard circuit depends on temperature through the exponential dependence of subthreshold leakage currents, so the beat frequency of the cilia rises smoothly as the fluid warms. The pumping speed therefore tracks temperature continuously rather than switching between two states. The oscillator architecture also supports synchronisation: coupling pulses from a designated leader oscillator advance the follower until the two lock with a fixed phase offset, a mechanism related to the pulse-coupled designs previously used for coordinating autonomous microscopic machines through local electronic pulses. This phase-locking provides a route to coordinated actuation across a cilia array without any central controller.

The third modality exploits spatial temperature gradients rather than absolute temperature. Using a scalable ultra-low-power temperature gradient sensor based on pulse-coupled oscillators, the robot determines which side of its body is warmer and aligns its pumping accordingly. When the imposed gradient is reversed, the leader and follower roles in the oscillator network exchange, and the pumping direction flips. The result is a microscopic machine that orients its fluid-mechanical output along the local thermal landscape, in loose analogy to the way ciliated protists orient their swimming relative to environmental cues. Together, the three modalities, threshold switching, continuous modulation and gradient alignment, form a toolkit for programming how a microrobot’s behaviour responds to its surroundings.

The most striking demonstration is the closing of the loop. Because the cilia-driven flows move fluid around, they transport heat, and the team showed that a collective array of cilia can actively reshape the local thermal field. In their experiments, unidirectional pumping advected fluid from a cooler region towards a hotter region, flattening the temperature gradient that the sensors were measuring. As the temperature field changed, the oscillator frequencies shifted, which in turn altered the pumping, which further modified the thermal field. The researchers modelled this feedback with a reduced two-dimensional description of thermally advected flow and quantified it through a thermal stretching length that grows cycle by cycle, fitting the dynamics with an exponential law. The system thus exhibits a genuine closed-loop interaction among sensing, actuation and environment, the microscopic analogue of an organism modifying its own habitat.

The experimental platform itself is a tour de force of integration. The devices were fabricated at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, with the CMOS circuits exposed by etching the top dielectric, then interconnected with titanium–platinum leads, re-encapsulated in silicon dioxide, shielded with a grounded layer, and finally released with an aluminium nitride sacrificial layer before the titanium–palladium actuator stack and rigid panels were added. Fluid temperatures were controlled with a hotplate and characterised by infrared thermography on dry samples, which showed a uniform region with a spatial standard deviation of about 0.11 degrees Celsius and a gradient region of roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius per millimetre; in liquid, where phosphate-buffered saline strongly absorbs mid-infrared radiation, the team used a micro-thermocouple instead. Flow fields were measured with particle image velocimetry and compared against three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the beating cilia, validating the theoretical model of the two-hinged kinematics.

The implications reach well beyond the laboratory demonstration. Artificial cilia that sense and respond to their environment could regulate temperature and chemical gradients in lab-on-chip systems, create fluid microhabitats for recruiting cells or controlling microbiomes in biomedical contexts, and serve as building blocks for emergent collective behaviours in swarms of autonomous micromachines. The theoretical framing, developed with physicists studying non-reciprocal phase transitions and adaptive active solids, suggests that populations of such robots could self-organise into patterns no single robot is programmed to produce, much as bacterial colonies generate large-scale spiral waves from local interactions. Because the platform is built with standard CMOS processes and mass-manufacturable techniques, scaling to larger and more capable microrobotic collectives appears feasible. The work was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, with additional support from the Kavli Institute at Cornell and Westlake University, and the team has filed patent applications covering the actuators and control electronics.

What makes this advance conceptually important is the shift from open-loop microrobots, which execute fixed motions, to machines that participate in a dynamic dialogue with their world. In nature, the coupling between organism behaviour and environmental modification underlies nest construction, swarm thermoregulation and microbiome recruitment; until now, engineered microrobots could sense or act, but rarely both in a feedback loop. By embedding thermal sensing, programmable logic and ciliary actuation on a single chiplet smaller than a grain of salt, the Cornell-led team has created the first microscopic robotic platform in which the environment is not merely a medium the robot moves through but a variable the robot actively regulates. As the researchers and their collaborators refine the sensing modalities and extend them to chemical and mechanical cues, the boundary between living, environment-shaping matter and engineered machines at the microscale looks set to blur further.

Subject of Research: Microscopic robots with onboard sensing, logic and cilia actuators that couple their behaviour to thermal environmental cues in a closed loop

Article Title: Microscopic robots that sense and reshape their environment

Article References: Wang, W., Zhang, J., Chaudhari, P., Shim, K., Severn, J., Zheng, C., Liang, Z., Ji, Y., Pelster, J., Griniasty, I., Seara, D., Vitelli, V., Lauga, E., Apsel, A., & Cohen, I. (2026). Microscopic robots that sense and reshape their environment. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01709-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01709-x

Keywords: microrobotics, artificial cilia, CMOS, electrochemical actuators, temperature sensing, microfluidics, closed-loop control, NEMS, collective behaviour, thermal regulation, Cornell University, Nature Electronics

The concept of engineered cilia draws its inspiration directly from biology. Cilia are the tiny, hair-like appendages that line surfaces throughout living organisms, from the airways of the human lung, where they sweep mucus and trapped debris along in coordinated waves, to the surfaces of single-celled organisms that use them to swim and to feed. Biological cilia achieve their remarkable effectiveness through dense, coordinated arrays in which individual filaments beat in synchrony, generating directed fluid flow with exquisite efficiency. Replicating that behavior in artificial microsystems has been a long-standing goal of microfluidics and microrobotics, because arrays of artificial cilia could, in principle, replace bulky external pumps and valves with silent, solid-state surfaces that move fluids on demand.

What sets the new work apart is the marriage of actuation with sensing and with mainstream semiconductor manufacturing. CMOS technology is the workhorse of the modern electronics industry, responsible for the billions of transistors that power everything from smartphones to data centers. By integrating microrobotic cilia onto CMOS platforms, the researchers inherit the maturity, scalability and precision of chip fabrication. Each cilium can be addressed and driven by underlying circuitry, and the same silicon infrastructure that powers the actuators can also host the sensors that monitor local conditions. In the demonstration discussed by Hu, the relevant environmental variable is temperature: the cilia respond to thermal cues by adjusting their beating, and in doing so they pump fluid across the chip surface.

The technical significance of this sensing-actuation coupling is difficult to overstate. Most microscale actuators to date have been open-loop devices: they perform a prescribed motion when stimulated, blind to the consequences of that motion. A cilium that can detect temperature and then modify fluid flow creates a feedback system embedded in the material itself. Temperature affects fluid viscosity, density gradients and chemical reaction rates, so a surface that senses heat and stirs fluid in response can, for example, redistribute thermal energy, homogenize concentration gradients or deliver reagents to where they are needed. The microrobotic cilia thus function simultaneously as sensors, actuators and pumps — three components that traditionally occupy separate devices and separate design disciplines.

This achievement builds on a decade of steady progress in microrobotics. Earlier landmark work by Marc Miskin and colleagues, published in Nature in 2020, introduced microscopic robots small enough to be invisible to the naked eye, capable of crawling under external stimulation and fabricated using processes compatible with existing semiconductor foundries. Subsequent work by the same community, including studies published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 and by Wang and colleagues in Nature in 2022, pushed toward ever more capable and controllable microrobotic systems. The new CMOS-integrated cilia represent a conceptual step beyond locomotion: rather than robots that move themselves through an environment, these are robots that stay put and transform the environment around them, one fluid pulse at a time.

Coordination is the second pillar of the achievement. A single cilium, whether biological or artificial, moves very little fluid. The power of ciliary systems emerges from collective behavior — thousands or millions of filaments beating in metachronal waves, the traveling patterns of motion that make biological cilia so effective. The theoretical foundations for such collective synchrony were laid long ago: the Kuramoto model, formalized by Mirollo and Strogatz in 1990, describes how large populations of coupled oscillators spontaneously fall into step, and the elegant geometry of ciliary coordination was analyzed by King, Ocko and Mahadevan in 2015. Nature offers a striking biological parallel in the aggregation patterns of bacteria such as E. coli, documented by Budrene and Berg in 1991, where individual cells following simple rules produce elaborate collective structures. The new microrobotic cilia tap into this same physics, using engineered coupling — mediated in part by the fluid they share and in part by their CMOS control layer — to generate coordinated pumping from individually simple units.

The fluid itself plays a crucial role in this coordination. At the microscale, fluid dynamics is dominated by viscosity rather than inertia, a regime characterized by low Reynolds numbers where momentum essentially does not exist and motion is entirely determined by the forces applied at each instant. Hydrodynamic interactions between neighboring cilia are strong and long-ranged in this regime, so the beating of one filament physically influences its neighbors through the surrounding fluid. This creates natural pathways for synchronization and wave propagation, and it means that the cilia and the fluid form a single coupled dynamical system. When the cilia sense a temperature change and alter their beating, they are not merely responding to their environment — they are renegotiating their collective behavior with it, moment by moment.

Potential applications span several fields. In microfluidics, CMOS-integrated ciliary surfaces could replace external pumps in lab-on-a-chip diagnostic devices, enabling fully portable analysis systems in which fluid handling is performed by the chip surface itself. In thermal management, the ability to sense hot spots and direct cooling flow toward them could transform how heat is removed from densely packed electronics, from high-performance processors to power electronics. In biology and medicine, surfaces that sense local conditions and stir fluid accordingly could improve cell culture systems, tissue engineering scaffolds and implantable devices, where gentle, distributed fluid motion is often essential for nutrient delivery and waste removal. Because the technology is CMOS-compatible, it could in principle be scaled to large areas using existing foundry infrastructure, a decisive advantage over exotic microfabrication approaches that never leave the laboratory.

The work also signals a broader philosophical shift in how researchers think about microscale machines. The traditional paradigm treats sensing and actuation as separate subsystems, connected by a controller — an architecture inherited from macroscopic robotics. At the microscale, where power, space and computational resources are all severely constrained, that separation becomes a liability. Systems in which sensing, computation and actuation are fused into a single integrated platform, as the CMOS cilia demonstrate, point toward microrobots that behave less like programmed machines and more like adaptive materials — surfaces whose mechanical response is inseparable from their perception of the world. Hu’s commentary frames this as a demonstration of how microscale actuators can both sense and actively modify their surroundings, a formulation that captures the essence of embodied intelligence at the smallest scales.

Challenges remain before such systems become commonplace. Driving dense arrays of actuators requires careful power management on-chip; long-term reliability of moving micromechanical structures in fluid environments must be established; and the repertoire of sensed variables will need to expand beyond temperature to include chemical composition, pressure and biological signals if the full vision of environment-shaping microrobotic surfaces is to be realized. Yet the trajectory is clear. From the first demonstrations of microscopic robots to today’s CMOS-integrated cilia that feel heat and answer with fluid motion, the field is converging on machines that live in, understand and reshape their microscopic worlds. As the boundaries between sensors, actuators and electronics continue to dissolve, the humble cilium — nature’s oldest micromachine — may prove to be the blueprint for the next generation of intelligent surfaces.

Subject of Research: CMOS-integrated microrobotic cilia that sense temperature and pump fluid to modify their microscale environment

Article Title: Microrobotic cilia that sense and reshape their surroundings

Article References: Hu, W. (2026). Microrobotic cilia that sense and reshape their surroundings. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01716-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01716-y

Keywords: microrobotics, CMOS integration, artificial cilia, microfluidics, temperature sensing, actuators, fluid pumping, collective synchronization, lab-on-a-chip, thermal management, Nature Electronics, microscale robotics

The central problem the team set out to solve is one that has dogged electronic textiles for years: how to embed genuine circuit-level functionality into fibres without wasting the fibre itself or creating fragile connections. Previous strategies often attached discrete components onto the surface of a fibre or built devices that used only a small fraction of the fibre volume. Interconnects between components tend to be unstable under the repeated bending, stretching and abrasion that clothing endures. Poor fibre utilization means much of the material contributes nothing to the electronics, while unstable interconnects mean the circuits fail exactly when a garment is treated like a garment.

The Donghua group’s answer is to make the fibre itself the circuit. Their microfluidic spinning process flows different functional materials through the channels of a spinning device, combining conductive layers with layers that perform specific functions. By switching the flow rates of the incoming streams during spinning, the researchers can arrange distinct functional modules along the fibre axis in a programmable sequence, rather like writing code that the spinning apparatus executes in material form. The team supported this design step with fluid-encoding simulations, drawing on established understanding of how flow velocity governs behaviour in microfluidic channels, to control where each module forms within the continuously drawn fibre.

Crucially, the researchers designed their modules around four fundamental types of signal conversion. Electroluminescent modules handle electron-to-photon conversion, turning electrical drive signals into emitted light. Resistor and capacitor modules perform electron-to-electron conversion, providing the passive components needed for analogue signal processing such as filtering. Organic electrochemical transistor modules carry out electron-to-ion conversion, translating electronic currents into ionic motion within a semiconductor polymer and thereby enabling digital logic operations. Finally, electro-quasistatic modules provide electro-quasistatic modulation, which the team exploited for touchless sensing and control. Because all four module families can be produced and integrated within the same spinning process, a single fibre can combine them into a working circuit tailored to a specific task.

The demonstrations span an impressive functional range. Electroluminescent IC fibres emit light, and a single fibre can encode a variety of luminescent colours along its length, suggesting displays or lighting elements woven directly into fabric. Resistor-capacitor IC fibres perform analogue signal processing, implementing functions such as tuneable filtering. Fibres built around organic electrochemical transistors execute digital logic, including inverter circuits, bringing Boolean operations into the thread itself. The electro-quasistatic IC fibres are perhaps the most striking: they sense the approach of a body or hand without contact, exploiting the quasistatic electric field coupling between the fibre and nearby conductors, and can translate that sensing into control signals.

To show that this touchless capability is more than a laboratory curiosity, the researchers connected their electro-quasistatic fibres to real machines. In supplementary demonstrations, the fibres controlled a virtual drone, a physical drone and a robotic arm, and a robotic arm equipped with the fibres automatically tracked a target object. The team even calibrated the relationship between applied voltage and sensing distance using a simple cardboard sheet wrapped in aluminium foil, and tested how nearby conductors interfere with the fibres’ operation, work that speaks to the practical engineering needed before such sensors can live inside clothing in the messy electromagnetic environment of daily life.

Durability, the historic weak point of e-textiles, receives serious attention. The IC fibres can be woven, sewn and arranged into textiles and, according to the researchers, withstand repeated deformation and washing. This mechanical resilience builds on the group’s earlier work on stretchable conductive fibres, in which a worm-shaped graphene microlayer enabled ultrahigh tensile strain and stable conductance, and on their broader research into soft fibre electronics based on semiconducting polymers. By embedding the functional layers within the fibre structure rather than coating them on top, the spinning process protects the electronics from the mechanical abuse that destroys surface-mounted devices.

The study situates itself within a rapidly maturing field. Recent years have seen large-area display textiles, fabric-based optical communication using diode fibres, digital electronics in fibres enabling fabric-based machine-learning inference, a single-fibre computer capable of textile networks and distributed inference, and a chipless textile electronics platform based on body-coupled fibres. Related work has produced fibre-integrated circuits through multilayered spiral architectures and axially encoded metafibers created by sequence spinning. What distinguishes the new approach is the programmability of the spinning process itself: rather than assembling pre-made components, the researchers encode circuit topology into the fluid flows that form the fibre, so the circuit design and the fibre manufacturing become a single continuous operation.

The implications reach toward what the authors frame through the lens of embodied intelligence, the idea that sensing, processing and feedback should be integrated into a physical platform rather than separated across devices. A textile based on IC fibres could, in principle, sense its environment, process the signals locally and respond with light, logic or actuation, all within the fabric. The researchers also point to applications in robotics, where their fibres already steer machines, and in wearable platforms that merge biosensing, computation and feedback. The fact that the team has released source data through Figshare and code through Code Ocean underscores the engineering orientation of the work, inviting others to reproduce the fluid-encoding process and build on the module library.

Challenges remain before IC fibres appear in commercial garments. The reported work demonstrates individual functional fibre types and their integration, but scaling production, achieving the transistor densities of conventional silicon, and managing power delivery through textile interconnects are all open problems. The electro-quasistatic sensing mode, while elegant, will require careful engineering to remain reliable around the conductors and interference sources that surround any wearer. Yet the core achievement stands: a spinning process in which the circuit is programmed into the fibre as it forms, yielding threads that glow, compute, filter and sense, and that survive the washing machine. If the module library continues to grow, the line between textile and computer may soon be measured in micrometres rather than millimetres.

Subject of Research: Programmable microfluidic spinning of fibres containing integrated circuit modules for smart textiles

Article Title: Programmable spinning of integrated circuit fibres

Article References: Sun, F., Chen, W., Jiang, F., Wang, K., Liu, F., Hong, Y., Han, X., Zhao, M., Zhu, Y., Sun, H., Wang, H., Wang, G., & Zhu, M. (2026). Programmable spinning of integrated circuit fibres. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01712-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01712-2

Keywords: electronic textiles, microfluidic spinning, integrated circuit fibres, organic electrochemical transistors, electroluminescence, wearable electronics, soft materials, touchless sensing, semiconducting polymers, flexible electronics, smart fabrics, Nature Electronics

The central idea is deceptively simple. Instead of assembling electronic components onto a textile after the fact, or laminating rigid chips onto fabric surfaces, the new approach builds functionality directly into the fibre itself. A single fibre can be turned into an integrated circuit, meaning that the basic building blocks of electronics, such as the ability to switch, amplify or process signals, reside within a thread that can be woven, knitted or stitched using conventional textile processes. The commentary accompanies a research paper by Wang and colleagues published in Nature, which reports the underlying fibre technology.

Why does this matter? Wearable electronics has made impressive progress over the past decade, from smartwatches to electronic skin patches, but most devices still rely on rigid silicon hardware mounted in rigid or semi-rigid packages. That architecture clashes with the fundamental nature of fabric, which is soft, stretchable, porous and constantly deforming as the body moves. The mismatch between hard electronics and soft textiles has limited the comfort, durability and washability of smart garments, and it has constrained the density of functionality that can be packed into a piece of clothing. Fibre-level integration attacks the problem at its root by making the electronic function and the textile substrate one and the same.

The microfluidic encoding strategy at the heart of the work offers a route to that integration. By using fluid-handling techniques to pattern and define structures along the length of a fibre, the method effectively writes information, and therefore function, into the fibre. The result, as characterized in the Nature Electronics commentary, is that individual fibres become active circuit elements rather than mere conductive pathways. This distinction is crucial. Conductive threads have existed for years, serving as wires and electrodes in experimental garments, but wires alone do not make a circuit. Logic, memory and signal conditioning require components with nonlinear electrical behaviour, and embedding such behaviour into a fibre has been a persistent materials and manufacturing challenge.

Scalability is the second pillar of the advance. Laboratory demonstrations of fibre electronics have often depended on slow, bespoke fabrication methods that cannot realistically produce the kilometres of fibre needed for commercial textile production. The commentary emphasizes that the microfluidic encoding approach provides a scalable route, suggesting that the technique is compatible with continuous or high-throughput processing. If fibre-based circuits can be manufactured with the same industrial maturity as conventional yarns, the gap between laboratory prototypes and market-ready smart textiles narrows considerably.

The implications extend across multiple fields. In health monitoring, garments woven from circuit-bearing fibres could continuously capture physiological signals such as heart activity, muscle activity or temperature without the electrodes, straps and rigid modules that current wearables demand. The commentary’s own authorship reflects this orientation: Zhu, Chow and Yu are affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering, and the Institute of Digital Medicine, institutions focused on translating flexible electronics into biomedical applications. Textiles that sense and compute invisibly within clothing could enable long-term, unobtrusive monitoring of cardiovascular and neurological health, an area where intermittent clinical measurements often miss important dynamics.

Deformability is another theme the commentary stresses. Practical textile electronics must survive repeated bending, stretching, twisting and laundering while maintaining electrical performance. Because the circuit function is distributed along the fibre rather than concentrated in a rigid chip, the resulting devices can in principle deform with the fabric, distributing mechanical stress across the textile structure. This is what the authors mean by deformable textile electronics: electronics whose mechanical properties match those of the woven or knitted structures they inhabit. The approach also opens possibilities in human-machine interfaces, soft robotics, distributed sensing networks and energy-harvesting fabrics, where conformal, textile-native electronics could replace bulky conventional hardware.

The Nature Electronics commentary situates the work within a broader research landscape. Its reference list points to earlier milestones in the field, including studies of fibre and textile electronics published in Nature Electronics in 2024, a review of fibre-based electronic materials in Nature Reviews Materials in 2023, and work on deformable electronic materials in Nature Materials the same year. Together, these references trace the trajectory of the field: from material innovations that made fibres conductive and semiconducting, through device architectures that brought transistor-like behaviour to fibre formats, to the current push for fully integrated, manufacturable circuit fibres. The new Nature paper by Wang and colleagues, and the companion Nature Electronics article by Sun and colleagues cited in the commentary, represent the latest stage in that progression.

Challenges, of course, remain, and the commentary’s framing makes clear that turning circuit fibres into everyday products will require continued engineering. Interfacing fibre circuits with power sources and communication modules, ensuring long-term reliability through washing and wear, achieving electrical performance comparable to conventional silicon devices, and integrating fibre electronics into existing textile supply chains are all nontrivial tasks. Electrical and electronic engineering and neuroscience, the two subject classifications Nature assigns to the commentary, hint at the breadth of the application space, from signal processing hardware to the neural and physiological signals such hardware might one day record and interpret.

Even so, the vision articulated by Zhu, Chow and Yu is compelling. If the microfluidic encoding strategy fulfils its promise, the fibre, humanity’s oldest technological platform, could become its newest computational substrate. Clothing that senses, computes and communicates would no longer require attaching electronics to fabric but would instead emerge from the fabric itself, thread by thread, woven on the same looms that have clothed civilizations for millennia. That convergence of textile craft and microelectronics, the commentary suggests, may be the key that finally moves wearable electronics from the gadget era into the garment era.

Subject of Research: Microfluidic encoding of individual fibres into active circuit elements for deformable textile electronics

Article Title: Weaving circuits into fibres

Article References: Zhu, W., Chow, L., & Yu, X. (2026). Weaving circuits into fibres. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01710-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01710-4

Keywords: wearable electronics, fibre electronics, textile circuits, microfluidic encoding, deformable electronics, Nature Electronics, smart fabrics, biomedical engineering, flexible electronics, health monitoring, City University of Hong Kong, integrated circuit fibre

Spintronics, the field that exploits the spin of electrons rather than merely their charge, has long promised memory devices that combine non-volatility with high speed. In modern magnetic random-access memory, information is stored in the orientation of a nanoscale magnet and written by transferring angular momentum from a spin-polarized current, a mechanism known as spin–orbit torque. When a current flows through a heavy-metal layer adjacent to a ferromagnet, the resulting torque can switch the magnet’s direction, encoding a zero or a one. The efficiency of that process, however, is governed by the current pulses available from the surrounding circuitry, and this is precisely where the new work makes its mark.

Conventional electronic pulse generators struggle to deliver the combination of amplitude, duration and on-chip integration that aggressive magnetic switching demands. Fast transistors and modulated laser schemes have been explored, but each carries trade-offs in footprint, energy cost or compatibility with dense integrated circuits. The alternative demonstrated here is deceptively simple in concept: a nanoplasma switch embedded on the chip itself. When a modest voltage is applied across a nanoscale gap, the device undergoes a rapid ionization event, forming a miniature plasma discharge that conducts an intense burst of current for an extraordinarily brief interval before extinguishing itself.

The physics of these discharges is rooted in well-understood gas ionization and electron avalanche processes, yet the nanoscale confinement changes the picture considerably. Because the active region is so small, the plasma forms and collapses on timescales set not by bulky external electronics but by the intrinsic carrier dynamics within the gap. The result is a current pulse measured in picoseconds, far faster than the switching speeds of the transistors that would otherwise be needed. Importantly, the switch is not a laboratory curiosity built with exotic equipment; it is fabricated using processes compatible with standard chip manufacturing, which means pulse generation can sit directly alongside the magnetic elements it drives.

The central experimental finding reported in the underlying research is that pulses produced by these nanoplasma switches are fast enough and strong enough to control the magnetization of ferromagnetic heterostructures through spin–orbit torque. In such heterostructures — stacks in which a heavy metal with strong spin–orbit coupling is paired with a thin ferromagnetic layer — the direction of the applied torque depends on the direction of the current. A pulse that drives electrons one way can set the magnet to one orientation; a pulse in the opposite direction can set it to the other. Demonstrating reliable reversal under picosecond excitation is the critical milestone, because it shows that the write mechanism of spintronic memory can keep pace with the fastest pulse sources now available on chip.

Speed matters for more than bragging rights. As memory devices shrink, thermal fluctuations make their magnetic bits less stable, and the window of current amplitudes that switch the bit deterministically narrows. Ultrafast pulses change this balance: they deliver torque in a burst short enough that switching can complete before the accumulated heat spreads through the device, potentially improving energy efficiency while maintaining reliability. Prior studies have shown that sub-nanosecond currents can reduce switching energies relative to slower write operations, and the picosecond regime explored here pushes that trend toward its physical limits. The commentary also situates the result within a growing body of work on plasma-based ultrafast electronics, including earlier demonstrations of nanoscale discharge devices that achieved picosecond switching without semiconductors at all.

Integration is the second pillar of the advance. A pulse generator that lives on the same chip as the memory cell eliminates the parasitic losses of off-chip interconnects, which otherwise smear and attenuate fast pulses before they reach the magnetic element. By placing the nanoplasma switch adjacent to the heterostructure, the researchers ensure that the full amplitude and sharpness of the discharge current arrive where they are needed. This co-location is what makes the approach practical: it converts an impressive physics demonstration into a plausible circuit element. The switch behaves, in effect, as a self-contained nanoscale pulse source that the surrounding CMOS logic can trigger with ordinary voltage signals.

The implications reach beyond memory. Spin–orbit torque switching underlies proposals for magnetic neuromorphic computing, where nanoscale magnets act as artificial neurons, and for non-von Neumann architectures that blur the boundary between storage and computation. If write pulses can be generated on demand in picoseconds with minimal overhead, the operating envelope of such systems widens dramatically. Arrays of nanoplasma-switched magnetic bits could, in principle, be reconfigured at rates approaching terahertz-scale dynamics, although the commentary is careful to note that translating single-device demonstrations into large-scale arrays will require careful management of discharge repeatability, electrode wear and thermal design.

Indeed, the researchers and the commentary both acknowledge the engineering questions that remain. Plasma discharges involve energetic ions and electrons that can erode the electrodes over many switching cycles, and guaranteeing that every pulse has identical amplitude is essential if the switching statistics of the magnetic element are to remain deterministic across billions of operations. Understanding the discharge physics at the nanoscale — how the plasma ignites, how it evolves during the picosecond pulse, and how it decays — will be essential for modeling device lifetimes. The field has already seen rapid progress: recent theoretical and experimental studies of spin–orbit torque, together with related ultrafast switching demonstrations in plasma-based electronics, suggest a maturing toolkit from which robust designs can emerge.

For now, the demonstration marks a conceptual shift. Rather than building ever-faster transistors to drive magnetic devices, engineers can borrow a page from plasma physics and let a nanoscale discharge do the work. The commentary in Nature Electronics frames the result as a step toward ultrafast spintronic systems in which the pulse generation, the magnetic switching and the sensing circuitry all coexist on a single chip. If the remaining reliability and scaling challenges can be met, on-chip nanoplasma switching could become the standard heartbeat of the fastest memories and spin-based processors — devices that write their bits in trillionths of a second while drawing power budgets compatible with mainstream computing.

Subject of Research: On-chip nanoplasma switches generating picosecond current pulses for ultrafast spin–orbit torque switching in ferromagnetic heterostructures

Article Title: On-chip nanoplasma switches for ultrafast spintronics

Article References: Díaz, E. (2026). On-chip nanoplasma switches for ultrafast spintronics. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01711-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01711-3

Keywords: spintronics, nanoplasma, spin–orbit torque, magnetic memory, picosecond pulses, Nature Electronics, ferromagnetic heterostructures, on-chip switching, magnetization reversal, nanoscale devices, MRAM, plasma electronics