Polymeric memory capacitor based on polarization effect fabricated by direct UV cross-linking method

Abstract A non-volatile memory capacitor is reported based on the polar-molecule system using a polymer as the dielectric. Two common dielectric polymers, polyvinyl pyridine (PVP) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), were studied, and their behavior was examined. To fabrication, the thin polymeric film layer was embedded between two electrodes to form a three-layer sandwich. The charge-voltage and pulse response characters were considered as the main resulted measurement. A memory window of 5 V was obtained by sweeping the applied voltage of the memory capacitor between ±10 V. Furthermore, the polarization role in charge-voltage hysteresis of the polymeric memory was confirmed with the permittivity–frequency measurement. The hysteresis was increased with the increasing of the polar branches existing inside the polymer. Sample in the uncrosslinked-polymer form displayed a large hysteresis, while no hysteresis was observed in photo-crosslinked ones. This selectivity in efficiency between uncrosslinked and photo-crosslinked samples enabled us to fabricate small size polymeric memory cells through a simple fabrication procedure. The presented memory capacitor shows repeatable, stable, and non-volatile memory behavior regarding data retention and erase/write operations for neuromorphic, printable, and biomedical applications.