Reprogrammable Binary and Ternary Optoelectronic Logic Gates Composed of Nanostructured GaN Photoelectrodes with Bipolar Photoresponse Characteristics

The elementary electronic-logic-gates, performing basic logic functions using electric signals as input, act as a building block of modern digital circuits. Intriguingly, the optoelectronic-logic-gates (OLGs), composed of optical devices, are emerging as a new logic platform which enables faster and large-capacity data transmission and processing by using photons as input. However, the strict operation principle of classic optical devices, for example, the unidirectional photoresponse of the photodetector, restricts the functional enrichment of OLGs. Herein, reprogrammable OLGs in a photoelectrochemical (PEC)-environment are reported by employing gallium-nitride semiconductor p-n nanowires as photoelectrodes where bidirectional photocurrent is achieved, leading to the demonstration of various binary OLGs including "NOT", "XOR", and "OR". Strikingly, thanks to the versatile tunability of PEC-photoelectrodes, the logic function of these OLGs is switchable by simply adjusting programming inputs including light intensity, bias voltage, electrolyte condition, and the physicochemical properties of the nanowire surface. Most importantly, unique ternary OLGs, for example, ternary "OR" gates, can also be realized based on binary ones by just tuning their applied bias for higher logic complexity applications, without changing the device architecture. Such reprogrammable binary and ternary OLGs could provide a new avenue toward next-generation logic circuits for fast computing and data-processing in the future.