An upconverted photonic nonvolatile memory

Zhou, Y., Han, S.-T., Chen, X., Wang, F., Tang, Y.-B. and Roy, V.A.L. (2014) An upconverted photonic nonvolatile memory. Nature Communications, 5, 4720. (doi: 10.1038/ncomms5720) (PMID:25144762)

Abstract

Conventional flash memory devices are voltage driven and found to be unsafe for confidential data storage. To ensure the security of the stored data, there is a strong demand for developing novel nonvolatile memory technology for data encryption. Here we show a photonic flash memory device, based on upconversion nanocrystals, which is light driven with a particular narrow width of wavelength in addition to voltage bias. With the help of near-infrared light, we successfully manipulate the multilevel data storage of the flash memory device. These upconverted photonic flash memory devices exhibit high ON/OFF ratio, long retention time and excellent rewritable characteristics.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: We acknowledge grants from the City University of Hong Kong’s Strategic Research Grant Project No. 7002724, the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project No. T23-713/11) and Shenzhen Municipality Project No. JCYJ20120618115445056. F.W. is grateful to CityU for a start-up grant and to the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China for an Exchange Program between Universities in Hong Kong and in the Mainland. We thank Mr Bing Chen at the Zhejiang University for his help on excited-state lifetime measurements.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Vellaisamy, Professor Roy
• Authors: Zhou, Y., Han, S.-T., Chen, X., Wang, F., Tang, Y.-B., and Roy, V.A.L.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering > Electronics and Nanoscale Engineering
• Journal Name: Nature Communications
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• ISSN: 2041-1723
• ISSN (Online): 2041-1723