R&D: Tuning Polymer Structures for Higher Performance Multi-level Data Storage through Molecular Design

Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspects has published an article written by Jiayu Li, Xianbo Meng, Jian Zhou, Songhao Zhao, Shuhong Wang, School of Chemical Engineering and Materials, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, PR China, Cheng Wang, School of Chemical Engineering and Light Industry, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, PR China, Zhuang Cai, School of Chemical Engineering and Materials, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, PR China, and Yanjun Zhang, Zhongshan Ploytechnic, Zhongshan, Guangdong Province 528400, PR China.

Abstract: “In recent years, designing advanced functional materials that can be used in organic memory devices has become a hot research topic. Among them, polymers have attracted much attention for having at least two stable resistive states. This work reports on the synthesis of various donor-acceptor (D-A) conjugated polymers based on quinoxaline via the Suzuki reaction. ITO/polymer/Al sandwich structure device were prepared with polymer as the active layer through solution spin-coating and Al as electrode by vacuum evaporation method. Among these memory devices, the memory devices based on the polymer (PFQx) synthesized by fluorene as the donor and quinoxaline as the acceptor exhibit excellent binary storage behavior. To further regulate the memory properties, we synthesize conjugated polymers (PFDQx, PFCQx, PFFQx) by modifying quinoxaline with different substituents to act as acceptors, and ternary switching behavior is shown by the memory devices made using these polymers. The PFCQx-based devices have the lowest ternary storage characteristics of V_th1 (-0.9 V) and V_th2 (-1.3 V) among all the devices, and the greatest switching current ratio of 10^4.6. All these results indicate the potential application of quinoxaline-based polymers in ternary storage and also provide new ideas for the molecular design of nonvolatile memory materials.“