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Semiconducting single-wall carbon nanotubes are ideal semiconductors for printed electronics due to their advantageous electrical and mechanical properties, intrinsic printability in solution, and desirable stability in air. However, fully printed, large-area, high-performance, and flexible carbon nanotube active-matrix backplanes are still difficult to realize for future displays and sensing applications. Here, we report fully screen-printed active-matrix electrochromic displays employing carbon nanotube thin-film transistors. Our fully printed backplane shows high electrical performance with mobility of 3.92 ± 1.08 cm V s, on-off current ratio I/I ∼ 10, and good uniformity. The printed backplane was then monolithically integrated with an array of printed electrochromic pixels, resulting in an entirely screen-printed active-matrix electrochromic display (AMECD) with good switching characteristics, facile manufacturing, and long-term stability. Overall, our fully screen-printed AMECD is promising for the mass production of large-area and low-cost flexible displays for applications such as disposable tags, medical electronics, and smart home appliances.

Sodium-ion batteries offer an attractive option for potential low cost and large scale energy storage due to the earth abundance of sodium. Red phosphorus is considered as a high capacity anode for sodium-ion batteries with a theoretical capacity of 2596 mAh/g. However, similar to silicon in lithium-ion batteries, several limitations, such as large volume expansion upon sodiation/desodiation and low electronic conductance, have severely limited the performance of red phosphorus anodes. In order to address the above challenges, we have developed a method to deposit red phosphorus nanodots densely and uniformly onto reduced graphene oxide sheets (P@RGO) to minimize the sodium ion diffusion length and the sodiation/desodiation stresses, and the RGO network also serves as electron pathway and creates free space to accommodate the volume variation of phosphorus particles. The resulted P@RGO flexible anode achieved 1165.4, 510.6, and 135.3 mAh/g specific charge capacity at 159.4, 31878.9, and 47818.3 mA/g charge/discharge current density in rate capability test, and a 914 mAh/g capacity after 300 deep cycles in cycling stability test at 1593.9 mA/g current density, which marks a significant performance improvement for red phosphorus anodes for sodium-ion chemistry and flexible power sources for wearable electronics.

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Nonvolatile, flexible artificial synapses that can be used for brain-inspired computing are highly desirable for emerging applications such as human–machine interfaces, soft robotics, medical implants, and biological studies. Printed devices based on organic materials are very promising for these applications due to their sensitivity to ion injection, intrinsic printability, biocompatibility, and great potential for flexible/stretchable electronics. Herein, we report the experimental realization of a nonvolatile artificial synapse using organic polymers in a scalable fabrication process. The three-terminal electrochemical neuromorphic device successfully emulates the key features of biological synapses: long-term potentiation/depression, spike timing-dependent plasticity learning rule, paired-pulse facilitation, and ultralow energy consumption. The artificial synapse network exhibits an excellent endurance against bending tests and enables a direct emulation of logic gates, which shows the feasibility of using them in futuristic hierarchical neural networks. Based on our demonstration of 100 distinct, nonvolatile conductance states, we achieved a high accuracy in pattern recognition and face classification neural network simulations.