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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.
Space–time-coding digital metasurfaces can be used to implement secure and low-cost space- and frequency-division multiplexing in a dual-channel wireless communication system.
An electric-field-induced reversible hydrogenation reaction, which relies on a hydrogen-ion electrolyte, can be used to create graphene field-effect transistors with on/off current ratios of 108 and endurance of up to 1 million switching cycles.
Twisted trilayer structures of anisotropic black phosphorus can be used to create resonant tunnelling diodes in which the twist angle between the layers can be used to control the vertical transport behaviour.
Multiple field-programmable gate arrays can be networked to create clustered, scalable architectures that can be used to run partitioned simulated bifurcation algorithms for solving non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard problems.
A hydrogel composite that consists of micrometre-sized silver flakes suspended in a polyacrylamide–alginate hydrogel matrix exhibits a high electrical conductivity of over 350 S cm−1 and a low Young’s modulus of less than 10 kPa.
Artificial corrugations in bilayer graphene can produce a nonlinear anomalous Hall effect that originates from the Berry curvature dipole and a linear Hall effect that originates from a warped Rashba-like valley–orbit coupled band dispersion.