Carbon nanotube thin-film transistors are expected to enable the fabrication of high-performance, flexible and transparent devices using relatively simple techniques. However, as-grown nanotube networks usually contain both metallic and semiconducting nanotubes, which leads to a trade-off between charge-carrier mobility (which increases with greater metallic tube content) and on/off ratio (which decreases). Many approaches to separating metallic nanotubes from semiconducting nanotubes have been investigated, but most lead to contamination and shortening of the nanotubes, thus reducing performance. Here, we report the fabrication of high-performance thin-film transistors and integrated circuits on flexible and transparent substrates using floating-catalyst chemical vapour deposition followed by a simple gas-phase filtration and transfer process. The resulting nanotube network has a well-controlled density and a unique morphology, consisting of long (~10 µm) nanotubes connected by low-resistance Y-shaped junctions. The transistors simultaneously demonstrate a mobility of 35 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) and an on/off ratio of 6 × 10(6). We also demonstrate flexible integrated circuits, including a 21-stage ring oscillator and master-slave delay flip-flops that are capable of sequential logic. Our fabrication procedure should prove to be scalable, for example, by using high-throughput printing techniques.

Identifying two-dimensional layered materials in the monolayer limit has led to discoveries of numerous new phenomena and unusual properties. We introduced elemental silicon during chemical vapor deposition growth of nonlayered molybdenum nitride to passivate its surface, which enabled the growth of centimeter-scale monolayer films of MoSi2N4. This monolayer was built up by septuple atomic layers of N-Si-N-Mo-N-Si-N, which can be viewed as a MoN2 layer sandwiched between two Si-N bilayers. This material exhibited semiconducting behavior (bandgap ~1.94 electron volts), high strength (~66 gigapascals), and excellent ambient stability. Density functional theory calculations predict a large family of such monolayer structured two-dimensional layered materials, including semiconductors, metals, and magnetic half-metals.

Manipulating a quantum state via electrostatic gating has been of great importance for many model systems in nanoelectronics. Until now, however, controlling the electron spins or, more specifically, the magnetism of a system by electric-field tuning has proven challenging. Recently, atomically thin magnetic semiconductors have attracted significant attention due to their emerging new physical phenomena. However, many issues are yet to be resolved to convincingly demonstrate gate-controllable magnetism in these two-dimensional materials. Here, we show that, via electrostatic gating, a strong field effect can be observed in devices based on few-layered ferromagnetic semiconducting CrGeTe. At different gate doping, micro-area Kerr measurements in the studied devices demonstrate bipolar tunable magnetization loops below the Curie temperature, which is tentatively attributed to the moment rebalance in the spin-polarized band structure. Our findings of electric-field-controlled magnetism in van der Waals magnets show possibilities for potential applications in new-generation magnetic memory storage, sensors and spintronics.