Polyoxometalates could solve flash memory conundrum

These are difficult to manufacture at a scale below 10nm, effectively setting an upper limit on the amount of storage it is physically possible to fit onto conventional silicon chips.

Scientists have previously suggested that using individual molecules to replace conventional data-storage components in flash memory could help create small devices capable of holding large amounts of data. However, attempts to design these molecules have faced significant practical barriers such as low thermal stability and high resistance, which has limited their use in pre-existing technologies.

A team from the University of Glasgow’s Schools of Chemistry and Engineering and Rovira i Virgili University, Spain, have developed a possible solution to these problems using metal-oxide clusters known as polyoxometalates.

Professor Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry, University of Glasgow, who led the research team, commented: “Conventional flash memory uses transistors whose design allows them to ‘remember’ whether they have been turned on or off after they’ve been removed from a power source. Those transistors’ positions correspond to binary, allowing data to be stored. We’ve been able to design, synthesise and characterise polyoxometalates that can trap charge and act as flash ram, as well as dope of the inner core of the clusters with selenium to create a type of memory we call ‘write-once-erase’. The clusters provide a balance of structural stability and electronic activity and their electronic functionality is tunable, making them suitable as storage nodes for flash memory. It’s also possible to fabricate them with devices which are already widely-used in industry, so they can be adopted as forms of flash memory without requiring production lines to be expensively overhauled.”

The research team’s paper, titled ‘Design and fabrication of memory devices based on nanoscale polyoxometalate clusters’, has been published in the journal ‘Nature’.