A Centimeter‐Scale Inorganic Nanoparticle Superlattice Monolayer with Non‐Close‐Packing and its High Performance in Memory Devices

Due to the near‐field coupling effect, non‐close‐packed nanoparticle (NP) assemblies with tunable interparticle distance (d) attract great attention and show huge potential applications in various functional devices, e.g., organic nano‐floating‐gate memory (NFGM) devices. Unfortunately, the fabrication of device‐scale non‐close‐packed 2D NPs material still remains a challenge, limiting its practical applications. Here, a facile yet robust “rapid liquid–liquid interface assembly” strategy is reported to generate a non‐close‐packed AuNP superlattice monolayer (SM) on a centimeter scale for high‐performance pentacene‐based NFGM. The d and hence the surface plasmon resonance spectra of SM can be tailored by adjusting the molecular weight of tethered polymers. Precise control over the d value allows the successful fabrication of photosensitive NFGM devices with highly tunable performances from short‐term memory to nonvolatile data storage. The best performing nonvolatile memory device shows remarkable 8‐level (3‐bit) storage and a memory ratio over 10⁵ even after 10 years compared with traditional devices with a AuNP amorphous monolayer. This work provides a new opportunity to obtain large area 2D NPs materials with non‐close‐packed structure, which is significantly meaningful to microelectronic, photovoltaics devices, and biochemical sensors.     

Non‐Volatile Ferroelectric Memory with Position‐Addressable Polymer Semiconducting Nanowire

One‐dimensional nanowires (NWs) have been extensively examined for numerous potential nano‐electronic device applications such as transistors, sensors, memories, and photodetectors. The ferroelectric‐gate field effect transistors (Fe‐FETs) with semiconducting NWs in particular in combination with ferroelectric polymers as gate insulating layers have attracted great attention because of their potential in high density memory integration. However, most of the devices still suffer from low yield of devices mainly due to the ill‐control of the location of NWs on a substrate. NWs randomly deposited on a substrate from solution‐dispersed droplet made it extremely difficult to fabricate arrays of NW Fe‐FETs. Moreover, rigid inorganic NWs were rarely applicable for flexible non‐volatile memories. Here, we present the NW Fe‐FETs with position‐addressable polymer semiconducting NWs. Polymer NWs precisely controlled in both location and number between source and drain electrode were achieved by direct electrohydrodynamic NW printing. The polymer NW Fe‐FETs with a ferroelectric poly(vinylidene fluoride‐co‐trifluoroethylene) exhibited non‐volatile ON/OFF current margin at zero gate voltage of approximately 10² with time‐dependent data retention and read/write endurance of more than 10⁴ seconds and 10² cycles, respectively. Furthermore, our device showed characteristic bistable current hysteresis curves when being deformed with various bending radii and multiple bending cycles over 1000 times.     

Towards the Development of Flexible Non‐Volatile Memories

Flexible non‐volatile memories have attracted tremendous attentions for data storage for future electronics application. From device perspective, the advantages of flexible memory devices include thin, lightweight, printable, foldable and stretchable. The flash memories, resistive random access memories (RRAM) and ferroelectric random access memory/ferroelectric field‐effect transistor memories (FeRAM/FeFET) are considered as promising candidates for next generation non‐volatile memory device. Here, we review the general background knowledge on device structure, working principle, materials, challenges and recent progress with the emphasis on the flexibility of above three categories of non‐volatile memories.