Electrochromic conductive polymer fuses for hybrid organic/inorganic semiconductor memories

Abstract

We demonstrate a nonvolatile, write-once-read-many-times (WORM) memory device employing a hybrid organic/inorganic semiconductor architecture consisting of thin film $\mathrm{p-i-n}$ silicon diode on a stainless steel substrate integrated in series with a conductive polymer fuse. The nonlinearity of the silicon diodes enables a passive matrix memory architecture, while the conductive polyethylenedioxythiophene:polystyrene sulfonic acid polymer serves as a reliable switch with fuse-like behavior for data storage. The polymer can be switched at ∼2 μs, resulting in a permanent decrease of conductivity of the memory pixel by up to a factor of ${10}^3.$ The switching mechanism is primarily due to a current and thermally dependent redox reaction in the polymer, limited by the double injection of both holes and electrons. The switched device performance does not degrade after many thousand read cycles in ambient at room temperature. Our results suggest that low cost, organic/inorganic WORM memories are feasible for light weight, high density, robust, and fast archival storage applications.