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Curvy and shape-adaptive imagers with high pixel fill factors and tunable focusing power can be created by transferring an array of ultrathin silicon optoelectronic pixels with a kirigami design onto curvy surfaces using conformal additive stamp printing.
By transferring two-dimensional semiconductors from rigid growth substrates together with nano-patterned metal contacts, flexible field-effect transistors can be fabricated with channel lengths down to 60 nm.
Boron arsenide and boron phosphide cooling substrates can be integrated with other materials, including the wide-bandgap semiconductor gallium nitride, creating structures that exhibit high thermal boundary conductances and high-electron-mobility transistors that exhibit low hot-spot temperatures.
Electromagnetic waves, which are either artificially introduced or present in the immediate surroundings, can couple to the surface of the human body, creating a power transmission and energy harvesting method that can be used to provide sustainable power to wearable devices all around the body.
A microstrip patch antenna array and a single high-electron-mobility transistor, which are created with inkjet printing, can be used for backscatter communication at millimetre-wave frequencies, providing a bit rate of two gigabits per second and with a front-end energy consumption of only 0.17 pJ per bit.
A tactile sensing system that can learn to identify different types of surface can be created using sensors that mimic the fast and slow responses of mechanoreceptors found in human skin.
Band-engineered van der Waals heterostructures that block dark current without suppressing photocurrent can be used to build detectors with high room-temperature detectivity for visible light and blackbody infrared light.
A three-phase system that is composed of a ferroelectric Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 matrix in which ferrimagnetic NiFe2O4 nanocolumns coated with antiferromagnetic p-type NiO are embedded exhibits self-biased magnetoelectric switching at room temperature.
Heterophase grain boundaries in memristors based on pentagonal palladium diselenide can guide the formation of conductive filaments during resistive switching, leading to devices with uniform switching properties, low set voltages, long retention times and programmable multilevel resistance states.
A commercial titanium-doped lithium niobate phase modulator can be employed at temperatures as low as 800 mK for the electro-optical readout of a superconducting electromechanical circuit at 15 mK.
Disorder in the charge carrier transport of graphene-based field-effect transistors can be used to construct physically unclonable functions that are secure and can withstand advanced computational attacks.
Molybdenum disulfide vertical transistors with channel lengths down to one atomic layer can be made with metal electrodes using a mechanical van der Waals transfer process that leads to a high-quality metal–semiconductor interface.
All-carbon thin-film transistors—made using crystalline nanocellulose as a dielectric, carbon nanotubes as a semiconductor and graphene as a conductor—can be printed onto paper substrates and the constituent materials subsequently recycled.
Bilayer beta tellurium dioxide nanosheets with p-type characteristics can be formed through the surface oxidation of a mixture of tellurium and selenium, and used to create transistors with performance that matches their n-type oxide counterparts.
A capacitive, fibre-like stretchable strain sensor, formed of two conductors in a double helical structure, can be combined with an inductive coil to create a wireless strain-sensing system for biomedical applications.
A wearable platform, which uses a thermal sensing module isolated from biofluids and a Bluetooth Low Energy system on a chip for wireless data transfer, can be used to continuously monitor sweat.
AlGaN/GaN nanowires containing multiple two-dimensional electron gas channels can be used to create tri-gate power transistors that overcome trade-offs between carried density and mobility.
Laser-induced terahertz emission, and time-of-flight measurements of the terahertz pulse, can be used to non-invasively characterize through-silicon vias, which are required for three-dimensional CMOS integration.
Large-scale sensing textiles that can conform to arbitrary three-dimensional geometries and are created through digital machine knitting of piezoresistive fibres can be used to record, monitor and learn human–environment interactions.