Investigation of charge trapping mechanism for nanocrystal-based organic nonvolatile floating gate memory devices by band structure analysis

This paper investigates the charge trapping mechanism and electrical performance of CdSe nanocrystals, such as nanoparticles and nanowires in organic floating gate memory devices. Despite of same chemical component, each nanocrystals show different electrical performances with distinct trapping mechanism. CdSe nanoparticles trap holes in the memory device; on the contrary, nanowires trap electrons. This phenomenon is mainly due to the difference of energy band structures between nanoparticles and nanowires, measured by the ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy. Also, we investigated the memory performance with C-V characteristics, charging and discharging phenomena, and retention time. The nanoparticle based hole trapping memory device has large memory window while the nanowire based electron trapping memory shows a narrow memory window. In spite of narrow memory window, the nanowire based memory device shows better retention performance of about 55% of the charge even after 104 sec of charging. The contrasting performance of nanoparticle and nanowire is attributed to the difference in their energy band and the morphology of thin layer in the device.