Nanowires have excellent properties such as high crystallinity, good mechanical properties, quantum confinement effect and high chemical activity, and thus are promising building blocks for many applications. Here we firstly review the fabrication of nanowires by top-down and bottom-up process. We then review nanowires as building blocks for bio applications including bio sensing, cell signaling and cell stimulating. It shows that nanowires are promising for the development of advanced bio technologies that can address ultrahigh sensitivity, and long term cell signaling and stimulating without cell damages.

Semiconductor nanowires (NWs) refer to one-dimensional semiconductor materials that have a diameter constrained to tens of nanometers or less and an unconstrained length. Over the past few decades, most efforts in the semiconductor NWs have been focused on synthesis, structure and morphology control, and assembly, as appropriate for diverse functional device applications. This paper provides a detailed overview of the recent research activities and major achievements in nanowire research, which especially includes nanowires synthesis, position and direction-controlled assembly or growth. In addition, the fine tuning of structure and morphology, and the related properties and device applications of the NWs are highlighted.

In future wearable electronic systems, 3-dimensional (3D) devices have attracted much attention due to their high density integration and low-power functionality. Among 3D devices, gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire transistor provides superior gate controllability, resulting in suppressing short channel effect and other drawbacks in 2D metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET). Silicon nanowires (SiNWs) are the most promising building block for GAA structure device due to their compatibility with the current Si-based ultra large scale integration (ULSI) technology. Moreover, the theoretical limit for subthreshold swing (SS) of MOSFET is 60 mV/dec at room temperature, which causes the increase in Ioff current. To overcome theoretical limit for the SS, it is crucial that research into new types of device concepts should be performed. In our present studies, we have experimentally demonstrated feedback FET (FBFET) and tunnel FET (TFET) with sub-60 mV/dec based on SiNWs. Also, we fabricated SiNW based complementary TFET (c-TFET) and SiNW complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) inverter. Our research demonstrates the promising potential of SiNW electronic devices for future wearable electronic systems.

BNNTs (Boron nitride nanotubes) is an analogue of CNTs (Carbon Nanotubes) in terms of lattice structure. In BNNTs, a boron atom forms sp2 hybridized bonding with three nitrogen atoms, and so does a nitrogen with three boron atoms in the honeycomb structure. Its innovative properties, such as high thermal conductivity, neutron shielding capability, superb oxidation resistance at $900^{\circ}C$, excellent chemical resistance, and superior mechanical properties are advantageous for a wide range of applications, especially for electric device packages, neutron shielding, protective coating materials, and functional composites. In this paper, boron nitride nanotube synthesis, properties and application are reviewed.