Transient WORM Memory Device Using Biocompatible Protamine Sulfate with Very High Data Retention and Stability

Interest in biodegradable and transient electronics is gaining due to their potential use in green electronics, biomedical devices, and sustainable solutions for e-wastes. In this paper we employed Protamine Sulfate (PS) as the active layer to demonstrate biodegradable transient resistive memory devices. The Au/PS/ITO device exhibits nonvolatile resistive switching with write-once-read-many (WORM) memory behavior. The observed WORM memory performance was very good with high memory window (4.57× 103), data retention (experimentally >106 s, extrapolated >108 s), device yield (∼87.5%), read endurance (>3.6 × 104), and device stability (>210 days). Bias induced charge trapping followed by conducting filament formation was the key to such switching. The electronic as well as optical behavior completely disappeared after 8 min of dissolution of the device in aqueous solution. As a whole this work suggests that the PS based WORM memory device may be a potential candidate toward designing biodegradable transient memory devices.