Pressure sensors, especially the typical capacitive sensors that feature low power consumption, have drawn considerable interest in emerging and rapidly growing fields such as flexible electronics and humanoid robots, but often suffer from limited performance. Here, we report a contact-dominated design for capacitive pressure sensors to dramatically improve the sensing response and linearity over a broad pressure range. This design is implemented by utilizing hierarchical microstructured electrodes made of robust conductive composites with metallic coverage and layered dielectrics with high unit-area capacitance to realize localized electric-displacement-field-enhanced capacitance change. We demonstrate a significant improvement in pressure response beyond 3000 and a sensing range exceeding 1 MPa, particularly with a near-linear response (optimized R2 of 0.9998) and high sensitivity of 9.22 kPa−1 in a wide pressure range of 0–100 kPa. Moreover, we present that the integration of the contact-dominated sensor with floating-gate low-dimensional semiconductor transistors can provide a transduced electrical response of \textasciitilde4 × 105 at a low operating voltage of 2.66 V due to the greatly enhanced pressure response. We also demonstrate the potential applications of our sensor in fluid physical property evaluation and precise dynamic control of a robotic arm for manipulation tasks.

Functional configurability is highly desired for flexible electronics to serve ever-changing and diverse application scenarios. In complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) logic circuits, functional configurations can be achieved at the most basic device level by modulating the P/N polarity of the field-effect transistors. The intrinsic ambipolarity of low-dimensional materials provides the possibility of configuring the polarity of the constructed transistors by selectively injecting carriers on demand with proper methodologies. In this study, we propose a strategy based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs), with the initial devices functioning as conventional p-type thin film transistors (TFTs), that achieves polarity configuration through reversible electrostatic doping by applying and removing a polymer doping layer on the channel area covered with a Y2O3 passivation layer. This method exhibits favorable characteristics, including high performance comparable to those of conventional devices under normal operation conditions, good P/N symmetry, large-scale uniformity, nonvolatile features, and robust stability. The resultant configurable TFTs facilitate the construction of a CMOS inverter with a rail-to-rail output and a high voltage gain exceeding 40. Basic circuit components such as diodes, rectifiers, and logic gates are constructed with reconfigurable functionalities. To illustrate its potential, we designed a reconfigurable CMOS circuit module that can be optionally programmed into four different functions─NAND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR, which can serve as a building block for constructing more complex reconfigurable integrated circuits, applicable in fields such as hardware security and adaptive monitoring.

The demand for aggressive scaling in integrated circuits technology has been a primary driving force behind the rapid advancement of nanotechnology, leading to groundbreaking innovations in nanoscience, engineering, and technology. Initially, the unique phenomena observed at nanoscale enable innovative applications in nanodevices. Now, as our understanding has greatly developed, nanodevices are increasingly being leveraged to provide solutions for a growing range of applications. In this perspective, several key areas are featured that are proposed to benefit significantly from advancements in nanodevices.

Digital-driven scaling poses significant problems to analog circuits because scaling severely deteriorates transistor current saturation, significantly degrading the intrinsic gain. Special material properties of emerging low-dimensional semiconductors trigger the possibility of providing solutions. We report complementary carbon nanotube thin-film transistors with negative differential resistance-induced current super-saturation for high, exponentially variable intrinsic gain with immunity against degradation during scaling. Current super-saturation at the negative-to-positive differential resistance transition boundary provides intrinsic gain singularities. The large-window, gate-modulated negative differential resistance behavior derived from carbon nanotube’s characteristics enables its practical utilization in circuits. When approaching the singularity, we record that the intrinsic gain varies by orders of magnitude, ranging from 102 to 106 at different operation points. We further demonstrate high and exponentially variable gain in an operational amplifier, showing a tunable single-stage gain ranging from 35 to 60 decibels.