Imagine building cheaper electronics on a variety of substrates — materials like plastic, paper, or fabric. Researchers at Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University have made a discovery that opens this door, allowing them to build electronic components like diodes on many different substrates.
Diodes made of oxide materials instead of traditional silicon are especially interesting because they can be fabricated at room temperature, as opposed to the 1,000° C typically required for silicon diodes. Besides complex materials engineering, the work shows a new route to greatly improve the rectification efficiency of oxide diodes by forming nanoscale current paths in oxides.
An extra bonus is that by carefully controlling the nanoscale paths, they can create either a resistive nonvolatile memory, so-called ‘RRAM,’ or a rectifying diode in the same structure. RRAM simply consists of a layer of transition metal oxides sandwiched between two metal electrodes and is being actively pursued by many companies as the next ‘big thing’ in memory.
