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Atomically sharp interface enabled ultrahigh-speed non-volatile memory devices

Nature Nanotechnology volume 16, pages 882–887 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The development of high-performance memory devices has played a key role in the innovation of modern electronics. Non-volatile memory devices have manifested high capacity and mechanical reliability as a mainstream technology; however, their performance has been hampered by low extinction ratio and slow operational speed. Despite substantial efforts to improve these characteristics, typical write times of hundreds of micro- or milliseconds remain a few orders of magnitude longer than that of their volatile counterparts. Here we demonstrate non-volatile, floating-gate memory devices based on van der Waals heterostructures with atomically sharp interfaces between different functional elements, achieving ultrahigh-speed programming/erasing operations in the range of nanoseconds with extinction ratio up to 1010. This enhanced performance enables new device capabilities such as multi-bit storage, thus opening up applications in the realm of modern nanoelectronics and offering future fabrication guidelines for device scale up.

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Fig. 1: Atomically sharp interfaces embedded in non-volatile memory device with floating-gate configuration built upon van der Waals heterostructures.
Fig. 2: Two-dimensional InSe-based floating-gate memory device with large memory window.
Fig. 3: Programming and erasing non-volatile InSe floating-gate memory devices with large extinction ratio and robust performance.
Fig. 4: Ultrafast operation of memory cell and enabling the multi-bit storage paradigm.

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Source data are provided with this paper. All relevant data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y.-Y. Zhang, S. Du, G. Qian and Z. Zhu for helpful discussions, and H. Yang, J. Li, C. Gu and Q. Huan for assistance in device fabrication and measurement. This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Projects of China (grant nos. 2016YFA0202300 and 2018FYA0305800), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 61888102), Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; grant nos. XDB30000000 and XDB28000000), Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS (Y201902) and Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program (BJJWZYJH01201914430039). M.O. acknowledges support from ONR (N000141712885) and NSF (DMR1608720). S.J.P. acknowledges support from the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under a Tier 2 grant (no. MOE2017-T2-2-139). A portion of the research was performed in the CAS Key Laboratory of Vacuum Physics.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Liangmei Wu, Aiwei Wang, Jinan Shi, Jiahao Yan.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Liangmei Wu, Aiwei Wang, Jiahao Yan, Zhang Zhou, Ce Bian, Jiajun Ma, Ruisong Ma, Hongtao Liu, Jiancui Chen, Yuan Huang, Lihong Bao & Hong-Jun Gao

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Liangmei Wu, Aiwei Wang, Jinan Shi, Jiahao Yan, Zhang Zhou, Ce Bian, Jiajun Ma, Ruisong Ma, Hongtao Liu, Jiancui Chen, Wu Zhou, Lihong Bao, Stephen J. Pennycook, Sokrates T. Pantelides & Hong-Jun Gao

  3. CAS Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Liangmei Wu, Aiwei Wang, Jinan Shi, Jiahao Yan, Zhang Zhou, Ce Bian, Jiajun Ma, Ruisong Ma, Hongtao Liu, Jiancui Chen, Wu Zhou, Lihong Bao & Hong-Jun Gao

  4. Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Lihong Bao & Hong-Jun Gao

  5. Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Min Ouyang

  6. Department of Materials Science and Engineering & Centre for Advanced 2D Materials, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Stephen J. Pennycook

  7. Department of Physics and Astronomy & Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Sokrates T. Pantelides

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Contributions

H.-J.G. supervised the overall research. L.B., M.O. and H.-J.G. designed the experiments. L.W., A.W., J.Y. and L.B. fabricated the devices and carried out the electrical measurements. J.S., S.J.P. and W.Z. performed the STEM measurements. A.W. constructed the home-made electric circuit with ultrashort voltage pulse signals with FWHM of 21 ns. L.W., L.B., A.W., J.S., J.Y., W.Z., M.O., S.T.P. and H.-J.G. analysed the data. L.W., L.B., J.S., W.Z., S.J.P., S.T.P., M.O. and H.-J.G. wrote the paper. All the authors contributed to the preparation of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Lihong Bao, Min Ouyang or Hong-Jun Gao.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1

Floating-gate memory devices based on 2D materials.

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Supplementary Information

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Wu, L., Wang, A., Shi, J. et al. Atomically sharp interface enabled ultrahigh-speed non-volatile memory devices. Nat. Nanotechnol. 16, 882–887 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-00904-5

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