Recent progress in piezotronics and tribotronics

As the electronic technology is approaching its limits of materials and processing, a smart interaction between functional device and environment is a promising way for future electronic technology above the Moore's law. The mechanical signal triggering is the most common and natural way for the smart interactions, which has realized direct interaction between human/ambient and electronics and artificial intelligence. In 2006, the piezotronic effect, as a novel effect, was first proposed by Wang to achieve the effective, adaptive and seamless interactions between electronic devices and the external stress, which utilizes the piezoelectric polarization potential as the virtual gate to tune/control the carriers' transportation in the electronic device. Since then, this new effect has been widely observed in many low-dimensional semiconductors such as ZnO, GaN, CdS nanowires, and 2D MoS2. In extension, tribotronics was first proposed in 2014 by Wang, which is about the devices manufactured using the electrostatic potential created by triboelectrification as a 'gate' voltage to tune/control energy transformation and electrical transport in semiconductors for the smart interaction between device and environment. Tribotronics has made rapid research progress and many tribotronic functional devices have been studied with a variety of materials, such as tribotronic tactile switch, memory, hydrogen sensor and phototransistor. This review highlights advances in piezotronics and tribotronics with focus on fundamental theories, nanoscale materials, functional devices and simulations. Our emphasis is mainly about their application for third-generation semiconductor. The concepts and results presented in this review show that the piezotronics and tribotronics will facilitate the development of MEMS/NEMS, self-powered sensing, man-computer interfacing, and active wearable electronics.