Overcoming the "retention vs. voltage'' trade-off in nonvolatile organic memory: Ag nanoparticles covered with dipolar self-assembled monolayers as robust charge storage nodes

Abstract

Organic non-volatile memory devices with significantly enhanced retention are explored with C-60 thin-film transistors containing silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) within gate dielectrics as charge storage nodes. Dipolar self-assembled monolayers covering Ag-NPs effectively prevent stored charges from being lost by providing an additional energy threshold for back-tunneling process. This enables long retention even with ultrathin tunneling dielectric layers, providing a simple means to realize long retention without causing an excessive increase in operation voltage. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.