Volume 6 Issue 8, August 2023

High-tech industries power the modern digital world, but their supply chains are particularly vulnerable to geopolitical and economic disruption. Urgent action is needed to improve supply-chain resilience.

The remarkable properties of graphene nanoribbons are promising for use in quantum technologies. To create quantum devices, however, individual nanoribbons must be contacted. This crucial step has now been demonstrated using single-walled carbon nanotubes as electrodes.

A skin-conformable system that is worn on the finger, and integrates optical sensors with memristors, can accurately classify finger-written inputs in three-dimensional space.

An autonomous wearable device that is capable of monitoring sweat for extended periods of time could help collect data for the development of personalized medicine.

This Perspective explores the development of metal halide perovskite transistors, examining the properties of halide perovskites and key perovskite transistors, and considering the challenges that exist in developing next-generation electronics and circuits using these devices.

Individual graphene nanoribbons synthesized by an on-surface approach can be contacted with carbon nanotubes—with diameters as small as 1 nm—and used to make multigate devices that exhibit quantum transport effects such as Coulomb blockade and single-electron tunnelling.

Magnetic fluctuations and random telegraph noise in vertical tunnelling heterostructure devices composed of vanadium-doped tungsten diselenide sandwiched between graphene layers can be tuned using an electric bias.

Organic semiconductor and colloidal quantum-dot-based thin-film image sensors show reduced noise, dark current and image lag when a pinned photodiode pixel structure, similar to those in silicon-based image sensors, is used.

Piezoelectric transducers based on ferroelectric hafnia–zirconia–alumina can be used to create nanoelectromechanical resonators that operate between 0.4 and 17.3 GHz and have an on/off isolation of 37 dB.

Programmable metasurfaces can be used for wireless attacks at the physical layer, highlighting potential security threats for next-generation wireless networks.

An integrated artificial synapse array and light-responsive motion sensor can be conformably attached to a finger and used to track finger motion in three-dimensional space.

A wearable sweat sensor powered by a flexible solar cell can continuously collect multimodal physicochemical data—glucose, pH, sodium ion, sweat rate and skin temperature—across indoor and outdoor physical activities for over 12 h.