Nature Electronics最新文献

Wearable systems that incorporate soft tactile sensors that transmit spatio-temporal touch patterns may be useful in the development of biomedical robotics. Such systems have been employed for tasks such as typing and device operation, but their effectiveness in converting pressure patterns into specific control commands lags behind that of traditional finger-operated electronic devices. Here, we describe a tactile oral pad with a touch sensor array made from a carbon nanotube and silicone composite. The oral pad can be operated by moving either the tongue or teeth, and it can detect various strains so that it functions like a touchscreen. Combined with a recurrent neural network, we show that the oral pad can be used for typing, gaming and wheelchair navigation through cooperative control of tongue sliding (below 50 kPa pressure) and teeth clicking (above 500 kPa pressure).

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors could potentially be used as channel materials in commercial field-effect transistors. However, the interface between 2D semiconductors and most gate dielectrics contains traps that degrade performance. Layered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) can form a defect-free interface with 2D semiconductors, but when prepared by industry-compatible methods—such as chemical vapour deposition (CVD)—the presence of native defects increases leakage current and reduces dielectric strength. Here we show that metal gate electrodes with a high cohesive energy—platinum and tungsten—can allow CVD-grown layered h-BN to be used as a gate dielectric in transistors. The electrodes can reduce the current across CVD-grown h-BN by a factor of around 500 compared to similar devices with gold electrodes and can provide a high dielectric strength of at least 25 MV cm⁻¹. We examine the behaviour statistically across 867 devices, which includes a microchip based on complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology.

Ising machines are annealing processors that can solve combinatorial optimization problems via the physical evolution of the corresponding Ising graphs. Such machines are, however, typically restricted to solving problems with certain kinds of graph topology because the spin location and connections are fixed. Here, we report a universal Ising machine that supports arbitrary Ising graph topology with reasonable hardware resources using a coarse-grained compressed sparse row method to compress and store sparse Ising graph adjacency matrices. The approach, which we term interaction-centric storage, is suitable for any kind of Ising graph and reduces the memory scaling cost. We experimentally implement the Ising machine using compute-in-memory hardware based on a 40 nm resistive random-access memory arrays. We use the machine to solve max-cut and graph colouring problems, with the latter showing a 442–1,450 factor improvement in speed and 4.1 × 10⁵–6.0 × 10⁵ factor reduction in energy consumption compared to a general-purpose graphics processing unit. We also use our Ising machine to solve a realistic electronic design automation problem—multiple patterning lithography layout decomposition—with 390–65,550 times speedup compared to the integer linear programming algorithm on a typical central processing unit.

Optical neurotechnologies use light to interface with neurons and can monitor and manipulate neural activity with high spatial-temporal precision over large cortical areas. There has been considerable progress in miniaturizing microscopes for head-mounted configurations, but existing devices are bulky and their application in humans will require a more non-invasive, fully implantable form factor. Here we report an ultrathin, miniaturized subdural complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) optical device for bidirectional optical stimulation and recording. We use a custom CMOS application-specific integrated circuit that is capable of both fluorescence imaging and optogenetic stimulation, creating a probe with a total thickness of less than 200 µm, which is thin enough to lie entirely within the subdural space of the primate brain. We show that the device can be used for imaging and optical stimulation in a mouse model and can be used to decode reach movement speed in a non-human primate.