Microcontact Printing: Microcontact Printing of Ultrahigh Density Gold Nanoparticle Monolayer for Flexible Flash Memories (Adv. Mater. 26/2012)

V. A. L. Roy and co-workers show on page 3556 how uniform monolayers of alkanethiol-protected gold nanoparticle arrays can be used as microcontact-printable chargingtrapping layers for application in flash memory. Large-area close-packed gold nanoparticles are first transferred to a poly(dimethysiloxane) stamp and then onto a flexible substrate. A large memory window and long retention times have been obtained due to the enhanced trapping sites with almost no lateral leakage, indicating the great potential for scaling down the current state-of-art flash memory.