{"id":232205,"date":"2026-02-27T05:28:57","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T11:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/new-technique-spots-hidden-defects-to-boost-reliability-of-ultrathin-electronics"},"modified":"2026-02-27T05:28:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T11:28:57","slug":"new-technique-spots-hidden-defects-to-boost-reliability-of-ultrathin-electronics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/new-technique-spots-hidden-defects-to-boost-reliability-of-ultrathin-electronics","title":{"rendered":"New technique spots hidden defects to boost reliability of ultrathin electronics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-technique-spots-hidden-defects-to-boost-reliability-of-ultrathin-electronics.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Future devices will continue to probe the frontier of the very small, and at scales where functionality depends on mere atoms, even the tiniest flaw matters. Researchers at Rice University have shown that hard-to-spot defects in a widely used two-dimensional insulator can trap electrical charges and locally weaken the material, making it more likely to fail at lower voltages. The findings are <a href=\"https:\/\/pubs.acs.org\/doi\/10.1021\/acs.nanolett.5c06347\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in Nano Letters.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy showing practical ways to detect when and where these defects form, we help make future devices more reliable and repeatable,\u201d said Hae Yeon Lee, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, who is a corresponding author on the study.<\/p>\n<p>Building ultrathin electronics such as advanced transistors, photodetectors and quantum devices involves stacking sheets of different 2D materials on top of each other into \u201cheterostructures.\u201d Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), prized for being atomically flat and chemically stable, is a common building block.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Future devices will continue to probe the frontier of the very small, and at scales where functionality depends on mere atoms, even the tiniest flaw matters. Researchers at Rice University have shown that hard-to-spot defects in a widely used two-dimensional insulator can trap electrical charges and locally weaken the material, making it more likely to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1523,38,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-engineering","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}