Formation of gold nanoparticles embedded in a polyimide film for nanofloating gate memory

A monolayer of vertically aligned Au nanoparticles embedded in a dielectric film was fabricated by sandwiching a 3.4-nm-thick Au film between two polyimide (PI) precursor layers. Au formed uniform-sized nanoparticles on the PI precursor and coalesced into 10nm sized nanoparticles during imidization, forming a well-dispersed monolayer of Au nanoparticles embedded in PI. Capacitance-voltage measurement at 300K showed that the monolayer of Au nanoparticles functioning as a floating gate in Al∕PI∕Au nanoparticles/PI/Si metal-insulator-semiconductor-type capacitor exhibited a capacitance hysteresis of 3.4V at an applied voltage of 6V. The memory effect can be potentially utilized in next generation flash memories.