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A photodiode with bio-plausible event sensing, filtering and adaptation behaviours to replicate the retinal nanostructure and visual pathway is presented, enabling consistent and high-performance machine vision under extreme lighting.

Heterointerfaces of organic semiconductors can show high electrical conductivity, but the details of their electronic structure remain largely unexplored. Schottky-gated heterostructures have now been used to probe the interface between single crystals of rubrene and PDIF-CN₂, showing that charge transport is due to electrons whose mobility exhibits band-like behaviour down to ~150 K.

The benchmark fullerene-based electron-transporting materials (ETMs) for inverted perovskite solar cells are often limited by thermal evaporation or stability issues. Here the authors report solution-processable non-fullerene ETMs with improved device stability and efficiency.

Organic semiconductor devices require good electrical contacts with conducting materials, but such contacts are often inefficient. An approach that tackles this problem will enable a wide range of applications. See Letter p.536

Printing electronic circuits will usher in a new era in electronics. With ion gel dielectrics, unprecedented transistor performance and speeds at low voltage can be demonstrated.

Fabricating thin films of organic semiconductors that have molecular order across large areas has proved challenging. Now, three complementary approaches — molecular design, fluid-flow control and the use of nucleating agents — offer unprecedented opportunities for next-generation optoelectronic applications.

Intrinsically polarized white-light emission is highly demanded for many applications. It is now possible to realize it via a bimolecular doping strategy of organic semiconductor single crystals, overcoming long-standing limitations in organic emitters.

Vertical organic electrochemical transistors demonstrating unprecedented performances in both p- and n-type operation modes have been synthesized from new electro-active and ion-permeable semiconducting polymers by the interface engineering of electro-active blend layers.

We find that 2D–3D perovskitoid passivation applied to perovskite solar cells impedes cation migration and decreases carrier recombination at the interface, providing enhanced operating stability at elevated temperatures and increased power conversion efficiencies.

Highly stretchable organic electrochemical transistors with stable charge transport under severe tensional strains are demonstrated using a honeycomb semiconducting polymer morphology, thereby enabling controllable signal output for diverse stretchable bioelectronic applications.

Though shape-changing devices are promising for future haptic displays, existing designs fail to provide smooth surfaces for the user during tactile exploration. Here, the authors utilize flexible auxetic structures to realize shape displays with smooth surfaces and different Gaussian curvatures.

Designing energy efficient, flexible opto-electronic systems integrated with textiles remains a challenge. Here, the authors propose a solution-based blow-spinning technique for 3D flexible and stretchable metal oxide nanofiber networks for multimodal and monolithically integrated wearable electronics.

Organic semiconductors are considered promising Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy platforms. Here the authors demonstrate that metal-free films based on a π-conjugated molecule containing a fully π-conjugated backbone provides an enhancement factor of 10⁵ and detection limit of 10⁻⁹ M for methylene blue.

Highly nanostructured purely organic films are shown to enhance the Raman signal of methylene blue molecules by three orders of magnitude, due to the unique molecular geometry, morphology and electronic properties of the films.

Solution-deposited metal oxides show great potential for large-area electronics, but they generally require high annealing temperatures, which are incompatible with flexible polymeric substrates. Combustion processing is now reported as a new low-temperature route for the deposition of diverse metal oxide films, and high-performance transistors are demonstrated using this method.

New designs of donor polymers yield organic solar cells with fill factors approaching 80%, significantly higher than those of conventional cells. This enhanced performance is attributed to the close-packed and highly ordered structure of the polymers PTPD3T and PBT13T, which leads to efficient charge extraction and suppressed recombination.

A previously undescribed photocatalytic approach enables the effective p-type and n-type doping of organic semiconductors at room temperature using only widely available weak dopants such as oxygen and triethylamine.

Vertical organic thin-film transistors can be used to create complementary circuits that operate at high frequencies.

Micropatterning of organic semiconductors by electron-beam exposure can be used to create vertical organic electrochemical transistor arrays and complementary logic circuits with densities of up to 7.2 million transistors per cm².

Aqueous rechargeable batteries are promising for grid storage and electric vehicles, but they suffer from poor cycle life due to anode instability. Exploiting stable ion-coordination charge storage and chemical inertness towards aqueous electrolytes, quinones are now reported as stable anodes.

An elastomer–semiconductor–elastomer stack structure can allow an intrinsically brittle n-type organic semiconductor to be stretched by 50% and used to make fully stretchable complementary electronics.

Printed thin-film transistors and circuits fabricated on plastic strips can be wrapped around fibres to create stretchable electronics.

An artificial synaptic transistor that uses a stretchable bilayer semiconductor as the channel and an encapsulating elastomer as the dielectric can exhibit both excitatory and inhibitory synaptic behaviour, even when under 50% strain.

Electron doping of organic semiconductors is typically inefficient, but here a precursor molecular dopant is used to deliver higher n-doping efficiency in a much shorter doping time.

Organic solar cells that use halogenated building blocks now boast power conversion efficiencies beyond 20%, albeit at the expense of increased synthetic complexity. This Perspective explores trade-offs among efficiency, scalability and cost–effectiveness in halogenated organic solar cells.

Semiconducting polymers with high mobility are essential for the development of high-frequency flexible electronics, whose fabrications rely on robust printing techniques. Bucellaet al. report the fabrication of n-type polymer field-effect transistors, with mobility up to 6.4 cm² V⁻¹s operated at 3.3 MHz, by room temperature bar-coating technique.

A range of plastic semiconductors have been developed that have the combination of physical and chemical properties required to enable printable electronic circuitry, but these are almost exclusively 'hole transporting' materials. If an electron-transporting equivalent could be found, it could be combined with the existing classes of materials to produce yet more powerful devices. This paper reports the development of a such a material: the electron-transporting plastic semiconductor exhibits unprecedented device performance, and is compatible with a broad range of printing and processing technologies.

Grain boundaries are already known to have a large effect on the charge-carrier mobility of molecular semiconductors. Several experimental and computational techniques now show that the orientation of grain boundaries in a perylene diimide semiconductor modulates carrier mobility by two orders of magnitude. The results provide important guidelines for producing device-optimized molecular semiconductors.

An organic light-emitting transistor has now been fabricated with a trilayer heterostructure. This architecture is shown to prevent both photon loss at the electrodes and exciton-charge quenching, thereby dramatically improving device efficiency and establishing these types of transistor as a promising alternative to organic light-emitting diodes.

Non-fullerene acceptors offer a promising development direction to increase the conversion efficiency and stability of organic photovoltaics. Here, Jianquan Zhang and co-workers highlight recent insight to guide molecular material design and discuss future challenges regarding device design and scalability.

Optical transparency, tunable conducting properties and easy processability make metal oxides key materials for advanced optoelectronic devices. This Review discusses recent advances in the synthesis of these materials and their use in applications.

Shirakawa, MacDiarmid and Heeger received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of conducting polymers. Here we summarize the impact of (semi)conducting polymers on fundamental research, synthetic accessibility at scale, industrial applicability and the future.