4 January 2010—Though flexible devices such as roll-up displays have been promised for several years, their commercialization has been stalled by a missing ingredient: a flexible form of flash memory. But researchers at the University of Tokyo have recently developed an organic, floating-gate nonvolatile memory that behaves like flash memory, which may solve that problem.
While silicon-based flash memory is fine for the mass data storage found in cellphones, digital music players, and thumb drives, fabricating it requires high processing temperatures, thus ruling out its production on flexible substrates like plastic. Organic semiconductors, however, can be processed at temperatures well below the melting point of most plastics.
What's more, "the cost of flash memory is too high to use in applications that require large arrays of memory," says Tsuyoshi Sekitani, an assistant professor in the University of Tokyo's department of electrical and electronic engineering and one of the researchers who developed the new memory. "But we can print our organic memory on flexible substrates and over large areas using inkjet printers. So costs will be low."
