Brain-inspired acoustic-optical system recognizes voice commands and drone trajectories
Peer-Reviewed Publication
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Researchers at Ningbo University have developed a brain-inspired acoustic-optical information reservoir system that combines a self-powered triboelectric acoustic sensor with an indium-zinc-oxide photoelectronic neuromorphic transistor. The integrated system can sense sound and light, reproduce synaptic-like memory behaviors, and convert voice commands and drone trajectory images into high-dimensional conductance states. Combined with a multilayer perceptron classifier, the system achieved average testing accuracies of approximately 89.8% for nine voice commands and 93.6% for nine drone trajectories. The work provides a potential hardware platform for intelligent voice interaction, multimodal edge sensing and autonomous applications in the low-altitude economy.
Laser processing is widely used to “repair” and pattern graphene oxide for flexible electronics. Surprisingly, researchers found that laser treatment can shorten rather than improve the material’s fatigue lifetime. By combining Raman spectroscopy, nano-infrared imaging and atomic force microscopy, the team discovered that laser irradiation selectively removes epoxide groups while leaving behind vacancy defects, revealing the chemical origin of fatigue degradation.
Oxide semiconductors are promising building blocks for complementary transparent electronics, and however p-type oxide semiconductors suffer from limited material choice and low carrier mobility as compared to their n-type counterparts. Herein, a wafer-scale growth of amorphous tellurium oxide (TeOx) thin films with p-type transport characteristics was demonstrated, through a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method coupled with a low-temperature post-annealing treatment. Ultrathin TeOx with the thickness down to several nanometers is prepared by oxidizing the Te thin films precisely deposited and controlled by PLD technique, where their stoichiometric ratio can be modulated by the annealing time. Moreover, the optical bandgap of TeOx is found to be varied from 0.59 eV to 0.98 eV during the oxidation process. As a result, the TeOx-based field-effect transistors exhibit a competitive hole transport behavior as compared to reported amorphous TeOx, along with the current on/off ratio exceeding 2 × 103 (1.3 × 107) and hole mobility of 47.6 ± 2 cm2·V-1·s-1 (41.8 ± 0.5 cm2·V-1·s-1) at 300 K (80 K). These findings promise a facile and controllable approach to synthesize wafer-scale and ultrathin p-type oxides for future complementary electronics.
Non‑thermal plasma (NTP) offers a low‑temperature route for direct CO2 reduction using H2O as the hydrogen source, but the non‑selective reactivity of gaseous ·H and ·OH radicals often limits product selectivity. Now, researchers from Southwest University of Science and Technology have designed a CeHfZr metal‑organic framework that adsorbs H2O to form a surface hydrogen‑bonded network. Under NTP, this network generates solvated ·H and ·OH radicals in situ, achieving a C2H4 production rate of 164.6 μmol·g-1·h-1, 15 times higher than single‑metal Ce. The work provides a new catalyst design strategy for converting industrial CO2 exhaust into valuable C2H4.
Flexible carbon nanotube thin-film transistors combine high carrier mobility, low-temperature fabrication and mechanical compliance, but reliable circuits require several tightly coupled electrical metrics to be optimized at the same time. Researchers at Peking University developed a machine-learning-guided framework that translates circuit-level targets into fabrication recipes, enabling 2 V ring oscillators, basic logic gates and a 1-bit full adder on flexible substrates.