A Novel Organic Electrical Memory Device Based on Metallofullerene-Grafted Polymer

Organic memory materials have advantages in flexible, large area film-forming, and low cost compared with inorganic storage materials. Developing new materials with high read-write speed, low-power consumption, multi-value storage capacity and other excellent properties has been a subject for the study of next-generation non-volatile storage devices. Metallofullerenes could be used either as electron acceptor or as electron donor to form charge transfer compound with polymers containing electron withdrawing or electron donor compounds. We successfully used metallofullerene-based polymer to fabricate ITO/Gd@C₈₂-PVK/Al sandwich nonvolatile memory device. The results of I-V test indicated that the new material exhibited typical bistable electrical switching and a nonvolatile rewritable memory effect. The theory calculation indicated that the encaged metal may serve as the important electron trapping center. PVK-Gd@C₈₂ is thus an example of a new type charge-transfer complex that integrates the conventional organic and inorganic charge transfer complexes, which provides a potential method to improve the processing, morphological stability, and electrical performance of organic memory devices.