New Fullerene-Based Polymers and Their Electrical Memory Characteristics

Covalent incorporations into polymers of fullerene were achieved via the Cu(I)-catalyzed azide–alkyne click polymerizations of a fullerene derivative monomer functionalized with 5-(trimethylsilyl)pent-4-yn-1-yl groups and a comonomer functionalized with azidomethyl groups, producing the novel fullerene polymers P1-C 60 and P2-C 60. Despite their extremely high fullerene loading levels, the polymers were soluble in common organic solvents and exhibited no aggregation of fullerene units in films. Moreover, devices containing these fullerene polymers were easily fabricated with common coating processes that exhibit excellent unipolar and bipolar flash memory characteristics as well as unipolar permanent memory characteristics, with high ON/OFF current ratios, long retention times, and low power consumption. These electrical switching behaviors were favorably operated by electron injection. Overall, these devices are the first n-type bipolar and unipolar digital polymer memory devices which can be operated in flash and write-once-read-many-times modes.