Silver nanowire/colorless-polyimide composite electrode: Application in flexible and transparent resistive switching memory

Improving the performance of resistive switching memories, while providing high transparency and excellent mechanical stability, has been of great interest because of the emerging need for electronic wearable devices. However, it remains a great challenge to fabricate fully flexible and transparent resistive switching memories because not enough research on flexible and transparent electrodes, for their application in resistive switching memories, has been conducted. Therefore, it has not been possible to obtain a nonvolatile memory with commercial applications. Recently, an electrode composed of a networked structure of Ag nanowires (AgNWs) embedded in a polymer, such as colorless polyimide (cPI), has been attracting increasing attention because of its high electrical, optical, and mechanical stability. However, for an intended use as a transparent electrode and substrate for resistive switching memories, it still has the crucial disadvantage of having a limited surface coverage of conductive pathways. Here, we introduce a novel approach to obtain a AgNWs/cPI composite electrode with a high figure-of-merit, mechanical stability, surface smoothness, and abundant surface coverage of conductive networks. By employing the fabricated electrodes, a flexible and transparent resistive memory could be successfully fabricated.