ZnO nanowire field-effect transistors with Pt nanocrystals fabricated on a flexible plastic substrate for a non-volatile memory application

In this work, a single ZnO nanowire field-effect transistor (NWFET) with discrete-trap storage nodes of Pt nanocrystals (NCs) embedded within Al ₂O₃, a high-κ tunneling/control dielectric material, was successfully fabricated on a flexible plastic substrate for a non-volatile memory application. The ZnO NWFET with embedded Pt NCs exhibits a clear hysteresis loop with a threshold voltage shift of 4.16 V under the ±15 V gate-source voltage sweep ranges, implying that the charging and discharging phenomena occur during the program/erase operations. The ZnO NWFET achieves a reasonable value of approximately 10⁵ for the on/off current ratio for read-out of storage data. Furthermore, memory features, such as programming efficiency and on-cell current, are compared between the flat and convexly bent states in order to investigate the feasibility of flexible plastic devices as transistors.