Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

A cross-disciplinary collaboration between investigators in Electrical Engineering and Chemistry has lead to the discovery of a promising new material system for nanoelectronics. This material system is a conducting polymer in which the electronic properties can be tuned by applying a voltage. The polymer system is electrochemically grown and has the property that transient current-voltage characteristics can be electric field controlled and exhibit memory effects. A memory cell has been demonstrated with a minimum dimension of less than 400 nm. A great advantage of this system is that it is compatible with conventional CMOS electronics in a high-density cross-bar array. The project will build on the proof of principle research and develop accurate models, explore new materials to enhance functionality, work with our industry partner (MOSAID) to design read/write circuitry compatible with standard CMOS and explore methods to fabricate devices of molecular scale. One concrete goal is to demonstrate an 8x8 memory array based on field modulated conjugated ploymers.