but remove the constraints of rigid, brittle, planar, wafer substrates, through the strategic integration with soft elastomers. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Compared with the conventional rigid devices, stretchable inorganic electronics not only allow large deformations without degradation in electronic performances, but also yield conformal integration with the complex surfaces of tissues of the human body. [8,[15][16][17][18][19][20] Due to these unique advantages, stretchable inorganic electronics technologies significantly broaden the application areas of conventional electronics, and also enable novel uses in health monitoring, advanced humanmachine interfaces and internet of things, such as epidermal electronics, [21][22][23][24][25] curvilinear electronics, [26][27][28] deformable optoelectronics, [29][30][31][32][33][34] transient electronics, [35][36][37] and many other bioelectronic systems. [38][39][40] With a series of rapid developments over more than a dozen of years, stretchable inorganic electronic systems now define a well-recognized and active field of study, encompassing a diverse range of fundamental and applied topics, [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] including, for example, a collection of unusual material/structure designs and techniques to integrate hard inorganic semiconductor components and geometrically structural interconnects in optimized layouts onto patterned soft substrates. [7,54,55] Stretchable electronics have achieved high levels of sophistication largely through the use of inorganic active materials. According to the utility of different conductive materials, stretchable inorganic electronics can be classified into three categories, including those based on the composite stretchable conductors, liquid metals, and structured semiconductors/metals. [49,[56][57][58] In the first category, novel nanomaterials dispersed into a polymer matrices form composite films or fibers, by coating, dipping, printing, and electrospinning. Various nanomaterials have been exploited in this context, including metal nanoparticles, nanowires, nanoflakes, and the allotropes of carbon (carbon nanotubes, graphene, and carbon blacks). [59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66] A key to this strategy is in maintaining interconnected pathways through these nanomaterials to enable highly conductive channels when the substrate is stretched. [67][68][69][70][71] Despite great progress, the conductivities of such composites are typically lower than those of conventional metals. The second category of stretchable inorganic conductors relies on liquid metals patterned and encapsulated into channels of elastomeric materials. [72,73] Such constructs can be bent and stretched to levels beyond those possible with conventional electronic materials.Over the past decade, the area of stretchable inorganic electronics has evolved very rapidly, in part because the results have opened up a series of unprecedented applications with broad interest and potential for impact, especially in bio-inte...

Biomimetic sensor technology is always superior to existing human technologies. The scorpion, especially the forest scorpion, has a unique ability to detect subtle vibrations, which is attributed to the microcrack-shaped slit sensillum on its legs. Here, the biological sensing mechanism of the typical scorpion (Heterometrus petersii) was intensively studied in order to newly design and significantly improve the flexible strain sensors. Benefiting from the easy-crack property of polystyrene (PS) and using the solvent-induced swelling as well as double template transferring method, regular and controllable microcrack arrays were successfully fabricated on top of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Using this method, any physical damage to PDMS could be effectively avoided. More fortunately, this bio-inspired crack arrays fabricated in this work also had a radial-like pattern similar to the slit sensillum of the scorpion, which was another unexpected imitation. The gauge factor (GF) of the sensor was conservatively evaluated at 5888.89 upon 2% strain and the response time was 297 ms. Afterward, it was demonstrated that the bio-inspired regular microcrack arrays could also significantly enhance the performance of traditional strain sensors, especially in terms of the sensitivity and response time. The practical applications, such as the detection of human motions and surface folding, were also tested in this work, with the results showing significant potential applications in numerous fields. This work changes the traditional waste cracks on some damaged products into valuable things for ultrasensitive mechanical sensors. Moreover, with this manufacturing technique, we could easily realize the simple, low cost and large-scale fabrication of advanced bioinpired sensors.

Flexible pressure sensors have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applications in healthcare monitoring and human–machine interactions. However, the complicated fabrication process and the cos of sensing materials limit their widespread applications in practice. Herein, a flexible pressure sensor with outstanding performances is presented through an extremely simple and cost-efficient fabrication process. The sensing materials of the sensor are based on low-cost carbon black (CB)@airlaid paper (AP) composites, which are just prepared by drop-casting CB solutions onto APs. Through simply stacking multiple CB@APs with an irregular surface and a fiber-network structure, the obtained pressure sensor demonstrates an ultrahigh sensitivity of 51.23 kPa–1 and an ultralow detection limit of 1 Pa. Additionally, the sensor exhibits fast response time, wide working range, good stability, as well as excellent flexibility and biocompatibility. All the comprehensive and superior performances endow the sensor with abilities to precisely detect weak air flow, wrist pulse, phonation, and wrist bending in real time. In addition, an array electronic skin integrated with multiple CB@AP sensors has been designed to identify spatial pressure distribution and pressure magnitude. Through a biomimetic structure inspired by blooming flowers, a sensor with the open-petal structure has been designed to recognize the wind direction. Therefore, our study, which demonstrates a flexible pressure sensor with low cost, simple preparation, and superior performances, will open up for the exploration of cost-efficient pressure sensors in wearable devices.

Functional electronics has promising applications, including highly advanced human-interactive devices and healthcare monitoring. Here, we present a unique printable micron-scale cracked strain sensor (PMSCSS), which is bioinspired by a spider's crack-shaped lyriform slit organ. The PMSCSS is fabricated by a facile process that utilizes screen-printing to coat carbon black (CB) ink onto a paper substrate. With a certain bending radius, a cracked morphology emerged on the solidified ink layer. The working principle of the PMSCSS is prominently attributed to the strain-dependent variation in resistance due to the reconnection-disconnection of the crack fracture surfaces. The device shows appealing performances, with superfast response times (∼0.625 ms) and high sensitivity (gauge factor = 647). The response time surpasses most recent reports, and the sensitivity is comparable. We demonstrate the application of the PMSCSSs as encoders, which have good linearity and negligible hysteresis. Also, the sensor can be manipulated as a vibration detector by monitoring human-motion disturbances. According to the sensory information, some details of movements can be deduced.

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired a surge of research exploring their expansion into the visual domain. While recent models exhibit promise in generating abstract captions for images and conducting natural conversations, their performance on textrich images leaves room for improvement. In this paper, we propose the Contrastive Reading Model (Cream), a novel neural architecture designed to enhance the language-image understanding capability of LLMs by capturing intricate details typically overlooked by existing methods. Cream integrates vision and auxiliary encoders, complemented by a contrastive feature alignment technique, resulting in a more effective understanding of textual information within document images. Our approach, thus, seeks to bridge the gap between vision and language understanding, paving the way for more sophisticated Document Intelligence Assistants. Rigorous evaluations across diverse tasks, such as visual question answering on document images, demonstrate the efficacy of Cream as a state-of-the-art model in the field of visual document understanding. We provide our codebase and newly-generated datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/cream.

Elastic stretchability and function density represent two key figures of merits for stretchable inorganic electronics. Various design strategies have been reported to provide both high levels of stretchability and function density, but the function densities are mostly below 80%. While the stacked device layout can overcome this limitation, the soft elastomers used in previous studies could highly restrict the deformation of stretchable interconnects. Here, we introduce stacked multilayer network materials as a general platform to incorporate individual components and stretchable interconnects, without posing any essential constraint to their deformations. Quantitative analyses show a substantial enhancement (e.g., by ~7.5 times) of elastic stretchability of serpentine interconnects as compared to that based on stacked soft elastomers. The proposed strategy allows demonstration of a miniaturized electronic system (11 mm by 10 mm), with a moderate elastic stretchability (~20%) and an unprecedented areal coverage (~110%), which can serve as compass display, somatosensory mouse, and physiological-signal monitor.

Integrated sensor–actuators with exciting functionalities, such as action self‐sensing, position self‐sensing, posture self‐sensing, or active sensing, are promising for applications in biomedical device, human–machine interaction, intelligent self‐protection devices, and humanoid robots. Despite recent progress, it remains challenging to achieve a macroscopical integrated sensor–actuator in a material system with microstructures. To address this critical challenge, a 4D printing bioinspired microstructure strategy is reported to design a high‐performance integrated sensor–actuator capable of simultaneous actuation and sensation. Decoupled thermal stimulation and strain sensation is achieved by combining nanocarbon black/polylactic acid composites with bioinspired gradient microgap structures. As a result, printed integrated sensor–actuators can actively touch objects triggered by thermal stimulation and self‐sense the touching state through the resistance change. It is anticipated that the basic design principle underlying this behavior can be used to develop integrated sensor–actuators of various shapes and functionalities to meet desirable applications.

As mobile/wearable devices with wireless data communication capabilities become increasingly miniaturized, sophisticated, and ubiquitous, [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] the interest in the development of antennas with large bandwidths and small sizes grows. Extensive academic and industrial studies focus on various designs for high efficiency electrically small antenna (ESA). An antenna is To address demands for increased data transmission rates, electrically small antennas (ESAs) that simultaneously offer large frequency bandwidths and small physical sizes are of growing interest. 3D layouts are particularly important in this context and among various 3D ESAs, systems that adopt hemispherical shapes are very promising, because they can occupy the entire Chu-sphere and offer outstanding electrical performance. Researchers have developed a few different approaches to fabricate high-quality hemispherical ESAs, but most have static layouts and fixed operating frequencies. Here, a mechanically guided 3D assembly approach is introduced for the design and fabrication of deformable hemispherical ESAs that can offer tunable, dynamic properties to adapt to changes in environmental conditions. The strategy exploits controlled compressive buckling of strategically patterned 2D precursor structures, as a low-cost and high-yield scheme that can exploit conventional, planar processing technologies and commercially available platforms. Combined numerical simulations and experimental measurements show outstanding performance characteristics in terms of the quality factor and radiation efficiency. Application of external tensile strains to elastomeric substrates for these systems allows them to be reshaped and reversibly tuned through a wide range of center frequencies.Mechanical testing under different loading conditions demonstrates the ability of these ESAs to accommodate large deformations.