The top 10 deeptech breakthroughs that changed everyday life
GPS, a system developed by the US military, has become an almost invisible global utility (photo: NASA on Unsplash)
Deeptech is often discussed as if it belongs permanently to the future. Quantum computers promise to transform industry. Fusion reactors could provide abundant clean energy. Synthetic biology may reinvent manufacturing.
How quickly we forget that many technologies that were once classified as promising now form an integral part of ordinary products, infrastructure and routines. We no longer marvel at the satellite constellation helping us find a restaurant, the microscopic machines rotating a smartphone screen or the semiconductor crystals improving the picture on a television.
The following countdown ranks ten deeptech breakthroughs by their reach, economic importance and influence on everyday life. While the order may be debatable, their impact is not.
10. Quantum dots brought nanotechnology into the living room
A quantum dot is a semiconductor crystal only a few nanometres wide. At that scale, its size helps determine the colour of light it absorbs and emits.
That sounds like laboratory physics. Yet anyone who has bought a television marketed as QLED may have encountered the result. In most current QLED televisions, quantum dots form a light-converting layer within an LCD display, helping to produce brighter and more precise colours. They are also used in some LED lamps and are being explored for solar cells, sensors and medical imaging.
The science emerged from experiments by Alexei Ekimov and Louis Brus in the 1980s. Moungi Bawendi later developed a reliable method for producing consistently high-quality particles. The three received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Quantum dots deserve a place on this list because they represent something once considered extraordinarily difficult: controlling the properties of matter by engineering it at the nanoscale.
9. MEMS sensors put microscopic machines everywhere
When a phone turns its display as you rotate it, a microscopic machine has noticed the movement.
Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, combine tiny mechanical structures with electronics, typically manufactured using techniques derived from semiconductor fabrication. Accelerometers detect motion, gyroscopes measure rotation and miniature pressure sensors monitor everything from car tyres to industrial equipment.
A high-end smartphone can contain around ten MEMS devices, including microphones, accelerometers and gyroscopes. They deploy airbags, stabilise drones, count footsteps and can detect when an older person has fallen. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology also points to applications in aircraft, earthquake monitoring and the detection of failing machinery.
Their greatest achievement may be invisibility. MEMS turned precision motion sensing from an expensive specialist capability into something cheap enough to place inside billions of consumer products.
8. CMOS image sensors gave almost everything eyes
Photography once required film, chemicals and patience. Today, a phone can take thousands of photographs, identify faces and record high-resolution video with a sensor smaller than a fingernail.
Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, or CMOS, image sensors convert incoming light into electrical signals using arrays of light-sensitive pixels. CMOS imaging existed before the 1990s, but a team led by Eric Fossum at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the CMOS active-pixel sensor while searching for smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient cameras for spacecraft.
The architecture integrated more camera functions on a single chip, reducing size, power consumption and manufacturing cost. It subsequently became suitable for mass production and now dominates smartphone cameras.
NASA says the JPL technology is employed in billions of devices, including phones, webcams, cars and medical equipment.
CMOS image sensors now provide vision not only to phones but also to factory inspection systems, security cameras, medical devices, autonomous machines and increasingly cars.
7. mRNA vaccines turned cells into medicine factories
Before 2020, few people outside biotechnology had heard of messenger RNA. Within a year, the abbreviation mRNA had entered everyday conversation.
The central idea is elegant: instead of manufacturing a protein and injecting it into the body, mRNA delivers genetic instructions that tell the body’s cells to produce a particular protein themselves. In practice, the approach was extremely difficult. Laboratory-produced mRNA was unstable, hard to deliver and could provoke an unwanted inflammatory response.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman discovered that modifications to mRNA’s nucleoside bases could suppress much of that reaction while increasing protein production. Lipid nanoparticles subsequently provided an effective way to protect the fragile mRNA and carry it into cells.
Their pivotal findings appeared in 2005; 15 years before COVID-19 created an urgent need for a rapidly adaptable vaccine platform. Their work enabled the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines and earned them the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The next test is whether mRNA technology can move beyond infectious diseases into personalised cancer vaccines and treatments for other conditions.
6. Blue LEDs made energy-efficient white lighting possible
Red and green light-emitting diodes existed for decades, but an efficient blue LED proved frustratingly difficult. Without blue, engineers could not combine the three primary colours to create bright white light.
The problem centred on producing high-quality gallium nitride, a notoriously difficult semiconductor material. Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura overcame the main barriers during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Blue LEDs enabled energy-efficient white lamps as well as the backlighting in phones, televisions and computer displays. Laboratory LED systems have surpassed 300 lumens per watt, compared with roughly 16 for an incandescent bulb, although ordinary commercial products operate below that record level.
The three researchers received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. A stubborn materials-science problem ended up changing how the world sees after dark.
5. Solar photovoltaic cells turned sunlight into infrastructure
The photovoltaic effect was first observed by French physicist Edmond Becquerel in 1839. The first practical silicon solar cell arrived at Bell Laboratories more than a century later, in 1954, with an efficiency of approximately 6%.
Solar cells initially made most economic sense in space, where satellites needed electricity without fuel deliveries. Terrestrial solar power remained expensive until improvements in silicon processing, cell architecture, manufacturing scale and global supply chains drove costs down.
Solar photovoltaic technology is now becoming a central part of the electricity system. Global solar generation increased by about 480 terawatt-hours in 2024—the largest increase recorded for any power source that year. Solar generation has approximately doubled every three years since 2016.
The transition is particularly visible in the Netherlands, where solar panels have become an ordinary feature of houses, farms, warehouses and car parks. Space-age semiconductor technology has become building material.
4. Fibre-optic communications put the world’s information into glass
Much of the internet travels not through the air but through strands of glass roughly as thin as a human hair.
Fibre-optic cables encode data into pulses of light. Their success depended on semiconductor lasers and on producing extraordinarily pure glass: early fibres lost too much light to carry information over useful distances.
Today, submarine fibre-optic cables connect continents, while terrestrial networks link homes, mobile masts, data centres and businesses. Wireless networks depend on them too. A video call, cloud application or streamed film may cross thousands of kilometres as rapid flashes of light before completing the final part of its journey over Wi-Fi or a mobile connection.
Fibre optics is a reminder that the “cloud” is highly physical. It rests on materials science, photonics, cable factories, specialised ships and an enormous network of buried and submerged infrastructure.
3. Neural networks brought artificial intelligence into the mainstream
Artificial neural networks date back decades, but for much of their history they were constrained by limited computing power, insufficient data, difficult training and inconsistent results.
That changed as processors became more powerful, digital datasets grew and machine-learning techniques such as deep learning improved. Neural networks began recognising speech, identifying objects, translating languages and recommending content. Generative AI then pushed the technology directly into offices, schools and homes.
The breakthrough is not one invention but a convergence of algorithms, specialised computing hardware, data and infrastructure. Its mainstream arrival is unusually visible: people are consciously experimenting with AI in a way they rarely experimented with MEMS or fibre optics.
Yet neural networks are also becoming invisible. They filter spam, detect payment fraud, optimise delivery routes and enhance smartphone photographs before users even see them.
2. GPS gave the planet a shared map—and clock
The Global Positioning System, better known as GPS, is commonly understood as a satellite navigation service. It is also an enormous precision timing system.
GPS satellites carry atomic clocks and broadcast precisely timed signals. A receiver normally uses signals from at least four satellites to calculate its three-dimensional position and correct the error in its own clock. It does this by comparing the signals’ arrival times and estimating its distance from each satellite.
Relativistic effects must be accounted for because satellite clocks experience time differently from clocks on Earth. Without those corrections, positioning errors would rapidly accumulate.
GPS now guides ships, aircraft, tractors, emergency services, delivery drivers and anyone looking for an unfamiliar address. Less visibly, its timing signals help synchronise telecommunications, electricity grids and financial transactions. Major communications networks, banking systems and power grids all depend heavily on satellite-derived precision timing.
A system developed by the US military has become an almost invisible global utility.
1. Lithium-ion batteries untethered modern life
No other technology on this list has done more to make the digital world portable.
Lithium is light and highly reactive, making it attractive for energy storage but difficult to control. Stanley Whittingham developed an early rechargeable lithium battery in the 1970s. John Goodenough subsequently created a more powerful cathode, while Akira Yoshino replaced reactive metallic lithium in the anode with a carbon-based material and produced the basis of the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery.
Sony commercialised lithium-ion batteries in 1991. Mobile phones shrank, laptops became genuinely portable and, eventually, electric vehicles became practical at scale. Lithium-ion batteries now also store electricity from wind and solar installations.
The three pioneers received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Nobel committee described their work as laying the foundation for wireless electronics and helping make a fossil-fuel-free society possible.
That makes the lithium-ion battery the biggest deeptech breakthrough in this countdown. It did not merely create a new product category. It liberated countless other technologies from the wall socket—and placed deeptech in our pockets, homes, vehicles and increasingly our electricity grids.
The pattern running through all ten breakthroughs is persistence. None travelled directly from a eureka moment to mass adoption. Each required years or decades of scientific research, engineering, manufacturing improvements and falling costs.
That may be the most useful lesson for today’s emerging technologies. The next world-changing deeptech breakthrough may already exist. It just has not yet become ordinary.
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