Flexible black phosphorus ambipolar transistors, circuits and AM demodulator.

But the new propulsion system — which the team calls the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster, or CAT — could change all that, turning such bantam spacecraft into interplanetary probes, Longmier and his colleagues say.

Palacios says that one of the ambipolar transistors he designed can convert a digital signal into a Bluetooth signal that can be sent between, for example, a mobile phone and a wireless headset.

A single ambipolar graphene transistor, Palacios has shown, can do the job all by itself.