A time when your mobile will be your virtual assistant and will need far

more than the memory that it has today, or a world where laptops
require terabytes of memory because of the impact of convergence
on the very nature of computing. Space a laptop will need to carry
all that memory capacity is very high , the use polymer memory
modules rather than silicon-based memory modules will be made
in use and it's going to use architecture that is quite different from
silicon-based modules.

While microchip makers continue to wring more and more from
silicon, the most dramatic improvements in the electronics
industry could come from an entirely different material plastic.
Labs around the world are working on integrated circuits,
displays for handheld devices and even solar cells that rely on
electrically conducting polymersnot siliconfor cheap and
flexible electronic components.


Digital Memory is and has been a close comrade of each and
every technical advancement in Information Technology.
The current memory technologies have a lot of limitations.
DRAM is volatile and difficult to integrate. RAM is high cost
and volatile. Flash has slower writes and lesser number of
write/erase cycles compared to others. These memory
technologies when needed to expand will allow expansion
only two dimensional space. Hence area required will be
increased. They will not allow stacking of one memory chip
over the other. Also the storage capacities are not enough to
fulfill the exponentially increasing need. Hence industry is
searching for Holy Grail future memory technologies for
portable devices such as cell phones, mobile PCs etc. Next
generation memories are trying a tradeoffs between size and
cost .This make them good possibilities for development.


As mentioned earlier microchip makers continue to wring more
and more from silicon, large number of memory technologies were
emerged. These memory technologies are referred as Next
Generation Memories. Next Generation Memories satisfy all of
the good attributes of memory. The most important one among
them is their ability to support expansion in three dimensional
spaces. Intel, the biggest maker of computer processors, is also the
largest maker of flash-memory chips is trying to combine the
processing features and space requirements feature and several
next generation memories are being studied in this perspective.
They include MRAM, FeRAM, Polymer Memory and Ovonics
Unified Memory.

Polymer memory is the leading technology among them. It is
mainly because of their expansion capability in three dimensional
spaces. The following graph also emphasis acceptance of Polymer
memory.

Memory Technology Comparison

Polymers are organic materials consisting of long chains of single
molecules. Polymers are highly adaptable materials, suitable for
myriad applications. Until the 1970s and the work of Nobel laureates
Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa,
polymers were only considered to be insulators. Heeger showed that
polymers could be conductive. Electrons were removed, or
introduced, into a polymer consisting of alternately single and double
bonds between the carbon atoms. As these holes or extra electrons are
able to move along the molecule, the structure becomes electrically
conductive.
Thin Film Electronics has developed a specific group of polymers that
are bistable and thus can be used as the active material in a non-
volatile memory. In other words, the Thin Film polymers can be
switched from one state to the other and maintain that state even
when the electrical field is turned off. This polymer is "smart", to the
extent that functionality is built into the material itself, like
switchability, addressability and charge store

This is different from silicon and other electronic
materials, where such functions typically are only
achieved by complex circuitry. "Smart" materials can be
produced from scratch, molecule by molecule, allowing
them to be built according to design. This opens up
tremendous opportunities in the electronics world, where
tailor-made memory materials represent unknown
territory
Polymers are essentially electronic materials that can be
processed as liquids. With Thin Films memory
technology, polymer solutions can be deposited on flexible
substrates with industry standard processes like spin
coating in ultra thin layers.


Making a digital memory device means finding a way to
represent the ones and zeros of computer logic, devising a
relatively convenient way to retrieve these binary patterns
from storage, and making sure the information remains
stable. Polymer memory stores information in an entirely
different manner than silicon devices. Rather than encoding
zeroes and ones as the amount of charge stored in a cell,
Coatues chips store data based on the polymers electrical
resistance. Using technology licensed from the University of
California, Los Angeles, and the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Novosibirsk, Coatue fabricates each memory cell
as a polymer sandwiched between two electrodes. To activate
this cell structure, a voltage is applied between the top and
bottom electrodes, modifying the organic material. Different
voltage polarities are used to write and read the cells.

Application of an electric field to a cell lowers the polymers
resistance, thus increasing its ability to conduct current; the polymer
maintains its state until a field of opposite polarity is applied to raise
its resistance back to its original level. The different conductivity
States represent bits of information. A polymer retains space charges
near a metal interface when there is a bias, or electrical current,
running across the surface. These charges come either from electrons,
which are negatively charged, or the positively-charged holes vacated
by electrons. We can store space charges in a polymer layer, and
conveniently check the presence of the space charges to know the state
of the polymer layer. Space charges are essentially differences in
electrical charge in a given region. They can be read using an
electrical pulse because they change the way the device conducts
electricity.
The basic principle of Polymer based memory is the dipole moment
possessed by polymer chains. It is the reason by which polymers show
difference in electrical conductivity. As explained earlier
implementing a digital memory means setting up away to represent
logic one and logic zero. Here polarizations of polymers are changed
up or down to represent logic one and zero. Now lets see what are a
dipole and a dipole moment.


When electric field is applied to solids containing positive and
negative charges, the positive charges are displaced in the
direction of the field towards negative end, while negative
charges are displaced in the opposite direction. Two equal and
opposite charges separated by a distance form a dipole. Hence
this displacement produces local dipoles throughout the solid.
The dipole moment per unit volume of the solid is the sum of all
the individual dipole moments within that volume and is called
Polarization of the solid. The intensity of dipole moment
depend on the extend of the displacement which in turn depend
on the applied electric field intensity.
Coatue fabricates each memory cell as a polymer sandwiched
between two electrodes. When electric field is applied polymers
local dipoles will set up. The alignment of local dipoles within a
polymer chain is shown in the diagram.

The alignment of local dipoles within a polymer
chain

The researchers made the storage device by spreading a 50-
nanometer layer of the polymer regioregularpoly on glass, then
topping it with an aluminum electrode. To write a space charge to the
device, they applied a positive 20-second, 3-volt pulse. To read the
state, they used a 0.2-volt, one minute pulse. In this process, a
continuous sheet of flexible polymer is unrolled from one spool,
covered with circuit-board-like patterns of silicon, and collected on
another spool. The Thin Film memory design is solid state, with no
mechanical or moving parts involved. It uses a passively addressed,
cross point matrix. An ultra thin layer of the TFE polymer is
sandwiched between two sets of electrodes. A typical array may
consist of several thousand such electrically conducting lines and
hence millions of electrode crossings.



Polymer microelectronics is potentially far less expensive to make
than silicon devices. Instead of multibillion-dollar fabrication
equipment that etches circuitry onto a silicon wafer, manufacturers
could eventually use ink-jet printers to spray liquid-polymer circuits
onto a surface. Polymer memory comes with an added bonus: unlike
the memory in your PC, it retains information even after the power is
shut off. Such nonvolatile memory offers potential advantagesnot
the least of which is the prospect of never having to wait around for a
PC to boot upand a number of researchers are working on various
approaches. But polymer memory could potentially store far more
data than other nonvolatile alternatives.
In the Thin Film system, a substrate is coated with extremely thin layers of polymer. The
layers in the stack are sandwiched between two sets of crossed electrodes. Each point of
intersection represents a memory cell containing one bit of information.

With Thin Films memory technology, polymer solutions can be
deposited on flexible substrates with industry standard processes like
spin coating in ultra thin layers. Using an all-organic architecture, the
Thin Film memory system is suitable for roll-to-roll manufacture.
This is a continuous production method where a substrate is wound
from one reel to another while being processed. The basic premise is
to exploit the fact that polymers can be handled as liquids and, at a
later stage, printed directly with the cross matrices of electrodes, thus
allowing square meters of memory and processing devices to be
produced by the second.
Expanding memory capability is simply a matter of coating a new
layer on top of an existing one. The footprint remains the same
even after expansion because each new layer adds the same
capacity as the first one. This stacking is a fundamental strength of
the Thin Film technology.
The driver circuitry, comprising column and row decoders, sense
amplifiers, charge pumps and control logic, is located entirely
outside the memory matrix, leaving this area completely clear of
circuitry, or be 100% built underneath the memory array. This is
the fundamental factor which enabled the stacking option..
If you want to add more memory with silicon-based technology,
you move in a two-dimensional space. Put simply, the area taken,
1gb RAM, is more than the area occupied by 512MB RAM. With
the new polymer-based technology, you will move in a three-
dimensional space.


That is, you move from talking about area to talking about
volume. Put simply, a 1 GB RAM module will have the same
footprint as a 512 MB module, but slightly thicker (or
higher). This difference in thickness or height will be so
small, that we may not even be able to tell the difference by
just looking at it. If a 512 MB silicon-based module takes up
20mmx10mmx6mm (1200 cubic mm of space), then 1 GB
occupies approximately double that volume. However, with
polymer-based memory, the footprint (length x breadth) will
remain the same (200 sq mm) but the height would increase
only by about 1/10000th of a millimeter, which adds
practically nothing to the volume. Polymer memory layers
are just 1/10,000 of a millimeter or less in thickness,
autonomous and easy to deposit.

Examples: The equivalent of 400,000 CDs, or 60,000 DVDs,
or 126 years of MP3 music may be stored on a polymer
memory chip the size of a credit card.


Polymer memory layers can be stacked This
enable to achieve very high storage capacity.
Memory is Nonvolatile
Fast read and write speeds
Very low cost/bit, high capacity per dollar
Low power consumption
Easy manufacture use ink-jet printers to spray
liquid-polymer circuits onto a surface
Thin Film system requires about 0.5 million
transistors per gigabit of memory. Traditional silicon-
based system would require between 1.5 to 6.5 billion
transistors for that same gigabit.


The fundamental strength, i.e. The stacking of memory
layers which yields maximum storage capacity in a given
footprint is the main reason why Polymer memory is highly
preferred. The non volatileness and other features are in built
in molecular level and offers very high advantages in terms of
cost. Polymers ,which are once considered to be the main
reason for pollution and referred to be removed from the earth,
has found a new area of utilization by introducing polymer
memory.