Design of Ultra-High Density Archival Storage Memory with Nanoprobe and Patterned Oxygenated Amorphous Carbon with Metal Nanoclusters

Abstract

Recent prosperity of artificial intelligence is undoubtedly making global data increase at a phenomenal rate. This obviously poses more stringent requirements on current storage devices. Unfortunately, considerable effort is only devoted to the development of on-chip storage device, while off-chip storage technology, particularly for archival storage device, remains slowly progressed. To further innovate the archival storage device, and thus revive its market, we here proposed a novel concept of an archival storage device based on scanning nanoprobe and oxygenated amorphous carbon having metal nanoclusters. A comprehensive numerical model was developed to mimic the write and readout performances of such archival storage device. It was found that the introduction of metal nanoclusters induced much stronger electric field inside the amorphous carbon layer than the case without metal nanoclusters. This beneficially facilitated the growth of conductive filament along metal nanoclusters, and the feasibility of using the proposed device to achieve an areal density of terabit per-square-inch area density, a write energy of picojoule energy per bit, and a switching speed of tens of nanoseconds, was demonstrated.