Fully printed memristors from Cu-SiO2 core-shell nanowire composites
An area of printed electronics in which additional development is necessary is printable non-volatile memory, which will be essential for the development of fully printed RFID tags and sensors with integrated data storage.[1] An approach to making a printable memory is to utilize materials that exhibit resistive switching; devices based on this mechanism are often referred to as memristors.[2] However, existing fully-printed memories using memristors have properties that do not allow for practical application, with inadequate cycling endurance (<104 cycles), slow write speeds (>10 μs), or short retention times (<10 years).[3-5] These flaws can be attributed that printed switching layers are thicker and less uniform that those deposited via vapor-phase methods. Our method of addressing this problem is to use a composite of copper-silica core-shell nanowires (Cu-SiO2 NWs). When coated from solution, these devices have modest switching voltages (2 V), a fast switching speed (50 ns), good endurance (>104 cycles), and data retention times (4 days) comparable to other fully printed memristors.[6] This work reports the fabrication and characteristics of a Cu-SiO2 NW/ethylcellulose composite that is aerosol printed in a fully-printed memristor array.
