Britain’s Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) – a non-profit dedicated to analysing and categorising cyber incidents in the UK – has declared the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) cyber attack a Category 3 Systemic Event on its “hurricane” scale and believes the overall financial cost to the economy adds up to about £1.9bn so far.

The cyber attack – linked to the loosely affiliated Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters hacking collective – shut down JLR’s assembly lines, with ripple effects spreading quickly across the UK’s automotive supply chain and harming more than 5,000 other organisations so far.

The CMC said its estimate, which sits within a modelled range of £1.6 to £2.1bn but may yet run higher, reflected the substantial disruption to JLR’s own capabilities and downstream organisations.

It cautioned that the estimate was still sensitive to multiple assumptions, with some key factors in this including whether or not JLR’s operational technology (OT) infrastructure was affected, and exactly when the organisation is able to fully restore its production lines – based on the time it took to reboot JLR production after the first Covid-19 lockdown, it estimates that this may not be until January 2026.

It described the JLR cyber attack as the single most economically damaging cyber event to ever hit the UK.

“That should make us all pause and think, and then – as the National Cyber Security Centre [NCSC] said so forcefully last week – it’s time to act. Every organisation needs to identify the networks that matter to them, and how to protect them better, and then plan for how they’d cope if the network gets disrupted,” said CMC technical committee chair and former NCSC lead Ciaran Martin.

CMC chief executive Will Mayes added: “We tend to think of systemic cyber risk as something that spreads through shared IT infrastructure: the cloud, a common software platform, or self-propagating malware. What this incident demonstrates is how a cyber attack on a single major manufacturer can cascade through thousands of businesses, disrupting suppliers, transport and local economies, and triggering billions in losses across the UK economy.

“No single organisation can manage these risks alone. Industry, insurers and government each have a role in strengthening the UK’s operational resilience. The CMC’s purpose is to create a shared, trusted evidence base that supports better decisions following major cyber events.”

The CMC’s assessment also considered some of the human impacts of the JLR attack, noting that while it had not endangered human life in the same way as cyber attacks on NHS bodies might, it had affected the job security of thousands, with knock-on consequences for mental and physical wellbeing and household resilience, as well as compound effects on existing economic, regional or social inequalities.

Phil Wright, partner at business advisory and accountancy firm Menzies, said the JLR incident demonstrated how exposed supply chains really are to disruption.

“The ripple effects stretch far beyond JLR itself. This isn’t just about delayed orders. Warehousing, logistics and even communication tools are paralysed, showing how fragile integrated supply chains become when a single system goes down,” he said.

“Integrated supply chains demand that all suppliers, regardless of size, need to critically evaluate the adequacy of their IT security infrastructure. The cost of more advanced infrastructure may be prohibitive for smaller players further down the chain, but their lack of resilience can mean that an incident proportional to their scale could be terminal.”

To meet the growing demands of flexible and wearable electronic systems, such as smart watches and biomedical sensors, electronics engineers are seeking high-performance transistors that can efficiently modulate electrical current while maintaining mechanical flexibility.

Thin-film transistors (TFTs), which are comprised of thin layers of conducting, semiconducting and insulating materials, have proved to be particularly promising for large-area flexible and wearable electronics, while also enabling the creation of thinner displays and advanced sensors.

Despite their potential, the energy-efficiency with which these transistors can switch electrical current has proved difficult to improve. This is due to the so-called thermionic limit, a theoretical threshold that delineates the lowest possible voltage required for a transistor to boost electrical current by a factor of 10 at room temperature when switching between “off” and “on” states.

Researchers at Soochow University and other institutes have developed a new TFT based on organic materials that could bypass this limitation, as it operates below the thermionic limit. The transistor, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to amplify signals with remarkable efficiency.

“Our work was driven by a fundamental challenge in wearable electronics and Internet of Things (IoT): the pursuit of high-performance devices with ultra-low-power consumption,” Jiansheng Jie, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

“Conventional organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) are inherently limited by the thermionic emission mechanism, which sets a theoretical minimum for the subthreshold swing (SS)—a key metric that determines how efficiently a transistor can switch—of 60 mV dec^-1 at room temperature. This inherent limitation results in excessive power dissipation during switching operations, posing a major barrier to energy-efficient operation.”

This recent study builds on recent works that highlighted the promise of so-called tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) based on inorganic semiconductors. These transistors were found to overcome the limitations of conventional transistors, leveraging a quantum mechanical process known as band-to-band tunneling.

“We sought to translate these advantages into the field of organic electronics,” said Jie. “Our central objective was to develop organic thin-film tunnel transistors (OTFTTs) capable of sub-60 mV dec^-1 performance, thereby breaking the fundamental thermionic limit that has long governed conventional OTFTs.

“By demonstrating such behavior in a solution-processable, flexible organic platform, our research addresses a critical gap in the technological evolution of organic electronics and paves the way toward low-voltage, highly efficient flexible circuits for next-generation wearable and IoT applications.”

The new OTFTT developed by the researchers replaces the thermionic injection mechanism that drives the operation of conventional TFTs with band-to-band tunneling. This process allows charge carriers to pass through the energy barrier directly and at extremely low voltages, significantly boosting the devices’ switching efficiency.

“The key innovation lies in the design of a hybrid inorganic-organic source-channel heterojunction,” explained Jie.

“We combined molybdenum trioxide (MoO₃), an inorganic metal oxide with a deep-conduction-band, with the 2,7-dioctyl[1]-benzothieno[3,2-b][1]benzothiophene (C8-BTBT) single-crystalline thin film, which has a relatively low highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energy level. This creates a ‘broken-gap’ alignment, where the HOMO of C8-BTBT lies above the conduction band (CB) of MoO₃.”

The configuration of the team’s transistor prompts the thermally excited tail of carriers originating from the MoO₃ source to be sharply truncated. This in turn effectively suppresses classical thermionic emission processes, making band-to-band tunneling the dominant carrier injection mechanism.

“Meanwhile, by introducing a molecular decoupling layer (BPE-PDCTI) at the heterojunction interface, the Fermi-level pinning effect was effectively alleviated and the tunneling barrier height was further reduced,” said Jie.

“This strategic design enables the device to trigger charge band-to-band tunneling at an extremely low supply voltage. As a result, our OTFTTs overcame the 60 mV dec^-1 thermionic limit on SS, achieving the lowest SS of 24.2 ± 5.6 mV dec^-1 among the existing thin-film transistor technologies, alongside the record-high signal amplification efficiency of 101.2 ± 28.3 S A^-1.”

The ultra-low SS yielded by the newly developed transistor is highly favorable for the development of low-power signal amplification circuits. In initial tests, circuits based on the transistor were found to achieve a gain in amplification of over 537 V V⁻¹ at an ultra-low power consumption below 0.8 nW.

“Our OTFTTs break the fundamental thermionic limit—a long-standing theoretical ceiling on SS (60 mV dec⁻¹ at room temperature) that has constrained the energy efficiency of conventional thin-film transistors for decades,” said Jie.

“This breakthrough not only redefines the performance boundaries of organic electronics but also enables a new class of ultra-low-power devices. The practical implications are substantial. Our OTFTTs are ideally suited for energy-constrained applications such as wearable health monitors, implantable biosensors, and self-powered IoT nodes.”

Notably, the OTFTT developed by Jie and his colleagues is compatible with existing processing and electronics fabrication strategies. In the future, it could be improved further and used to develop a wide range of high precision sensing devices, including trackers for the diagnosis or monitoring of specific medical conditions, environmental sensing systems and neuromorphic (brain-inspired) computing hardware.

“In bridging the gap between the intrinsic physical limitations of organic semiconductors and the stringent efficiency demands of next-generation technologies, this work represents a critical step toward intelligent, pervasive, and environmentally benign electronic systems,” said Jie.

Other researchers could soon build on the team’s design and set out to develop similar OTFTTs. Meanwhile, Jie and his colleagues plan to continue improving their device, for instance, by optimizing its performance via the careful engineering of energy levels at the interface between the organic materials it is based on.

To do this, they will select organic semiconductors with reduced bandgaps and lower carrier effective mass, while also creating high-conductivity interfacial decoupling layers that could enhance the transistor’s tunneling efficiency and performance.

“We will also expand the technology to n-type OTFTTs to enable all-organic tunneling logic circuits, addressing the current gap in low-power organic logic applications,” added Jie.

“Moreover, we plan to deploy OTFTTs in high-precision biomedical signal amplification (e.g., EEG, EMG), ultra-sensitive environmental sensing (e.g., trace gas detection, low-light imaging), and low-power IoT signal processing.

“Finally, we will continue developing scalable integration techniques for the large-scale fabrication of the OTFTTs on flexible substrates, aiming to accelerate the industrial adoption of high-performance, energy-efficient organic electronic systems.”

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