Tag Archives: Albert V. Davydov

Two-dimensional material stacks into multiple layers to build a memory cell for longer lasting batteries

This research comes from Purdue University (US) and the December announcement seemed particularly timely since battery-powered gifts are popular at Christmas but since it could be many years before this work is commercialized, you may want to tuck it away for future reference.  Also, readers familiar with memristors might see a resemblance to the memory cells mentioned in the following excerpt. From a December 13, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

The more objects we make “smart,” from watches to entire buildings, the greater the need for these devices to store and retrieve massive amounts of data quickly without consuming too much power.

Millions of new memory cells could be part of a computer chip and provide that speed and energy savings, thanks to the discovery of a previously unobserved functionality in a material called molybdenum ditelluride.

The two-dimensional material stacks into multiple layers to build a memory cell. Researchers at Purdue University engineered this device in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Theiss Research Inc.

A December 13, 2018 Purdue University news release by Kayla Wiles, which originated the news item,  describes the work in more detail,

Chip-maker companies have long called for better memory technologies to enable a growing network of smart devices. One of these next-generation possibilities is resistive random access memory, or RRAM for short.

In RRAM, an electrical current is typically driven through a memory cell made up of stacked materials, creating a change in resistance that records data as 0s and 1s in memory. The sequence of 0s and 1s among memory cells identifies pieces of information that a computer reads to perform a function and then store into memory again.

A material would need to be robust enough for storing and retrieving data at least trillions of times, but materials currently used have been too unreliable. So RRAM hasn’t been available yet for widescale use on computer chips.

Molybdenum ditelluride could potentially last through all those cycles.
“We haven’t yet explored system fatigue using this new material, but our hope is that it is both faster and more reliable than other approaches due to the unique switching mechanism we’ve observed,” Joerg Appenzeller, Purdue University’s Barry M. and Patricia L. Epstein Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the scientific director of nanoelectronics at the Birck Nanotechnology Center.

Molybdenum ditelluride allows a system to switch more quickly between 0 and 1, potentially increasing the rate of storing and retrieving information. This is because when an electric field is applied to the cell, atoms are displaced by a tiny distance, resulting in a state of high resistance, noted as 0, or a state of low resistance, noted as 1, which can occur much faster than switching in conventional RRAM devices.

“Because less power is needed for these resistive states to change, a battery could last longer,” Appenzeller said.

In a computer chip, each memory cell would be located at the intersection of wires, forming a memory array called cross-point RRAM.

Appenzeller’s lab wants to explore building a stacked memory cell that also incorporates the other main components of a computer chip: “logic,” which processes data, and “interconnects,” wires that transfer electrical signals, by utilizing a library of novel electronic materials fabricated at NIST.

“Logic and interconnects drain battery too, so the advantage of an entirely two-dimensional architecture is more functionality within a small space and better communication between memory and logic,” Appenzeller said.

Two U.S. patent applications have been filed for this technology through the Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization.

The work received financial support from the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the NEW LIMITS Center (led by Purdue University), NIST, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Material Genome Initiative.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Electric-field induced structural transition in vertical MoTe2- and Mo1–xWxTe2-based resistive memories by Feng Zhang, Huairuo Zhang, Sergiy Krylyuk, Cory A. Milligan, Yuqi Zhu, Dmitry Y. Zemlyanov, Leonid A. Bendersky, Benjamin P. Burton, Albert V. Davydov, & Joerg Appenzeller. Nature Materials volume 18, pages 55–61 (2019) Published: 10 December 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0234-y

This paper is behind a paywall.

Nature imitates art at Northeastern University (US)

It’s an intriguing mental exercise trying to flip the tables on nature as an inspiration for art to start discussing ‘artmimetics’ as they seem to be doing at Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts, US), according to a Dec. 11, 2013 news item on Azonano,

There are exam­ples of art imi­tating nature all around us—whether it’s Monet’s pastel Water Lilies or Chihuly’s glass­blown Seaforms, the human con­cep­tion of nat­ural phe­nomena daz­zles but does not often surprise.

Yet when asso­ciate pro­fessor of physics Latika Menon peered under the elec­tron micro­scope last fall, she dis­cov­ered the exact oppo­site. Instead of art imi­tating nature, she found nature imi­tating art.

The Dec. 10, 2013 Northeastern University news release by Angela Herring, which ‘inspired’ the news item, describes how Menon and her colleagues came to reverse the inspirational direction,

Menon grew up in the eastern region of India and was vaguely familiar with a cul­tural dance from the western state of Rajasthan known as the Bhavai pot dance. Nimble dancers sway their hips as a tall stack of wide-​​bellied pots bal­ances gin­gerly atop their heads. Back in the lab at North­eastern, Menon’s team recently cre­ated  gal­lium nitride nanowires, which bore a striking resem­blance to that stack of pots.

What’s more, a post­doc­toral research asso­ciate in Menon’s lab, Eugen Panaitescu, jumped on the band­wagon with a cul­tural art ref­er­ence of his own. Panaitescu, who hails from Romania, also saw his country’s famous End­less Column reflected in the nanowires. Ded­i­cated to the fallen Romanian heroes of World War I, Con­stantin Brancusi’s 96-​​foot-​​tall mono­lith is con­structed of 17 three-​​dimensional rhom­buses, peri­od­i­cally wavering from a wider cir­cum­fer­ence to a nar­rower one.

The news release goes on to explain more about applications using gallium nitride and why Menon’s insight may prove useful in developing new uses for gallium nitride nanowires,

… Gal­lium nitride is used across a range of tech­nolo­gies, including most ubiq­ui­tously in light emit­ting diodes. The mate­rial also holds great poten­tial for solar cell arrays, mag­netic semi­con­duc­tors, high-​​frequency com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices, and many other things. But these advanced appli­ca­tions are restricted by our lim­ited ability to con­trol the material’s growth on the nanoscale.

The very thing that makes Menon’s nanowires beau­tiful rep­re­sents a break­through in her ability to process them for these novel uses. She deposited onto a sil­icon sub­strate small droplets of liquid gold metal, which act as cat­a­lysts to grab gaseous gal­lium nitride from the atmos­phere of the exper­i­mental system. The net forces between the tiny gold droplet, the solid sub­strate, and the gas cause the nanowire to grow in a par­tic­ular direc­tion, she explained. Depending on the size of the gold cat­a­lyst, she can create wires that exhibit peri­odic serrations.

“It first tries to grow out­ward, but that gives the gold a larger sur­face area,” she said. “So now the wire gets pulled in the inward direc­tion, and then the gold gets a smaller sur­face area, so it grows out­ward again.” This inward and out­ward growth repeated itself again and again to create a peri­odic struc­ture nearly 6 mil­lion times smaller than the end­less column and is sig­nif­i­cantly more promising for its use in advanced devices.

“That there is very little imple­men­ta­tion of nanowire tech­nology in elec­tronics or optical devices is due to the fact that it’s very hard to con­trol their shape and dimen­sions,” said Menon. But now that she has a very simple way of con­trol­ling growth, the next step is to con­trol the size of the cat­alytic droplet with which she starts.

Another advan­tage of Menon’s approach is using what Panaitescu called “macro­scopic tech­niques” to create nanoscale mate­rials, thus making it scal­able and inex­pen­sive. “We just con­trol a few para­me­ters and then leave it, let it do it’s nat­ural thing,” explained Menon.

Here’s an image the researchers have supplied to illustrate their insights and their work,

Depending on the size of the gold cat­a­lyst used to make them, Latika Menon’s nanowires will exhibit peri­odic grooves that resemble common motifs in art. Images cour­tesy of Latika Menon. - See more at: http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2013/12/menon-nanowires/#sthash.LkgJU4es.dpuf

Depending on the size of the gold cat­a­lyst used to make them, Latika Menon’s nanowires will exhibit peri­odic grooves that resemble common motifs in art. Images cour­tesy of Latika Menon. – See more at: http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2013/12/menon-nanowires/#sthash.LkgJU4es.dpuf

I’m not sure I can connect the  imagery in this pot dance video (it does show some pretty astonishing feats of balance) with any of the images from Menon’s lab but sometimes the source of an inspiration is not readily accessible to those who are not amongst the inspired or perhaps there other versions of the dance that make it more obvious to an untrained eye,

Here’s an image of the other artistic inspiration, Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column found on Dr. Cătălina Köpetz’s (University of Maryland) webpage featuring Brancusi’s work along with this quote from him “Create like a god, comand like a king, work like a slave.”

The Endless Column, Târgu Jiu, România  [downlaoded from http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~ckopetz/brancusi.htm]

The Endless Column,
Târgu Jiu, România [downlaoded from http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~ckopetz/brancusi.htm]

Interestingly, Dr. Köpetz is a social psychologist working in the university’s Center for Addictions, Personality, and Emotion Research.

For anyone who’d like to read more about Menon’s work, here’s a link to a webpage featuring a PDF selection of her papers and a citation for her latest paper on the work described in the news release,

Vapor–liquid–solid growth of serrated GaN nanowires: shape selection driven by kinetic frustration by Zheng Ma, Dillon McDowell, Eugen Panaitescu, Albert V. Davydov, Moneesh Upmanyu and Latika Menon, Physics Faculty Publications (2013)

Compound semiconducting nanowires are promising building blocks for several nanoelectronic devices yet the inability to…

The paper is open access although you will have to click a few times to retrieve it.