Advances in piezotronic transistors and piezotronics

Abstract Innovative technologies beyond or can augment the conventional metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-based technology to achieve adaptive and seamless interactions between electronics/machine and human/ambient are urgently needed for smart systems. Piezotronic transistors are a new type of devices designed using completely different principles from CMOS-based technology, which utilize inner-crystal piezoelectric potential as the gate controlling signal to control the electrical transport process, which have been widely demonstrated for the third-generation semiconductors (such as ZnO, GaN). Such devices are innovative in a way that the traditional external channel-width gating is replaced by an inner interface gating or inner channel-width gating. These nanodevices and integrated nanosystems show great potential to achieve complementary functionalities to the state-of-the-art CMOS technology. Coupling the piezoelectricity and the electrical transport process in piezoelectric semiconductors results in the emerging field of piezotronics, which show promises for advanced nano-electromechanical devices and micro/nano-electromechanical systems. This manuscript reviews the advances in piezotronic transistors, provides an overview of the development and gives in-depth understandings in the new area of piezotronics. A perspective is given about their further development and potential applications in energy harvesting, active electronics and intelligent sensing.