The world of electronics could be changed forever as a team of scientists have developed a memory device made of organic materials. These organic memories are cost-efficient, easy to manufacture, and lightweight just like a memory device should be. In order to make it work, the scientists built a field-effect transistor on paper, and in the same time, they demonstrated its great performance.

“The longest time that has lasted from organic memories is about 5,000 seconds. This just doesn’t allow for practical use in many cases as a memory device. What we have shown is that it is possible to store information on paper, electronically, for more than a year and a half,” said Rodrigo Martins, a scientist at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Probably the best part about this device is that it can already be to manufactured at room temperature with ease. This organic memory device is made of long fibers from pine and polyester which were coated with gallium indium zinc oxide. The scientists used a technique called magnetron sputtering, and all of these also made the paper to be erasable and rewritable, and that it can hold hold multiple layers of information.

“What we are doing is exploiting the memory effect. We have a sort of type of integrated foam composed of fibers set up that increases the capability of storing carriers or charges in our paper. We have integrated discrete fibers, and contacts are applied on the extremes of the channel region to allow the induced carriers to move. Electrons move along the fibers,” said Martins.

“If I want my paper to catch information I can apply a signal of, say, five volts. And it writes on the paper. If I want to erase the information, I basically apply minus five volts – the opposite. But, at the same time, I can write another layer of information using 10 volts. The paper can distinguish between the two, and even if I erase the five volt information, the 10 volt information remains,” he added.

In conclusion, Martins explained the implications that this technology could have and he let us know that he is very confident that in a few years this paper memory device could enter on the market and be commercialized worldwide.

“You can have multiple layers of information on a product label. Instead of just the expiring date, you can have more than this, including information about when it went on the shelves. You can create a display, bringing a new dimension to the paper. You push a button and it changes. You can see a static or dynamic picture, or even another page. Such technology is still some years away. It will take five or six years to really work out how to use this technology to such an effect. But we do know that paper can store a great deal of information. We have the paper transistor; we have the memory. We have everything we need to make this happen,” said Martins.

Pedro Barquinha, Luís Pereira, Nuno Carreia, Gonçalo Gonçalves, Isabel Ferreira and Elvira Fortunato were also involved in this project called “Write-erase and read paper memory transistor” and hopefully, they will be able to complete this technology in just a few years.

Note: the picture is only a type of organic memory device and not the paper developed by the scientists from the New University of Lisbon, Portugal.