New high performance digital memory devices fabricated with DNA and DNA-mimics

Abstract

We report the first digital nonvolatile memory devices fabricated with DNA and DNA-mimicking brush polymers. Salmon testes and calf thymus DNA devices, as well as DNA-mimicking brush polymer devices revealed p-type unipolar write-once-read-many-times memory behaviors with low switching-on voltage and high ON/OFF current ratio. Such permanent memory characteristics were confirmed to originate from the charge trapping and hopping nature of nucleobase moieties. Overall, this study demonstrated that DNA and DNA-mimicking polymers are good candidate materials for the production of p-type permanent memory devices with high performance, high stability and low power consumption.