Electrical Bistable Devices Based On P3HT/PEO Films

Recently, electrical bistable devices have gradually become an important research direction. The organic electrical bistable devices have attracted more attention due to their unique advantages, such as high storage density, flexibility, low cost and so on. In this work, we fabricated three kinds of polymer electrical bistable devices based on (3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and poly (ethylene oxide) (PEO), the major contents of the work are as follows:(1) The study of single-layer polymer thin film electrical bistable devices. The sin-gle layer device composed of P3HT and PEO blend were fabricated by spin coating and the structure of this device is ITO/P3HT:PCBM/Al. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of the cross section of the device and the electrical properties of the devices were measured. The effect of P3HT/PCBM ratio on the electrical characteristics of the device was studied. The ON/OFF ratio is reached 103 s. Finally, the charge transport on the high resistance and low resistance states of the devices was studied by the IV curve fit-ting.(2) The study of the polymer thin film electrical bistable device based on the dou-ble-layer formed by the spontaneous phase-separation. During the course of fabrication, the P3HT/PEO blend solution was pin coated on the ITO coated glass substrate and the P3HT and PEO double layer was formed in thermal annealing process due to the spontaneous vertical phase separation owing to their very different hydrophilicity char-acteristics. The resulted device structure is ITO/PEO/P3HT/Al. Then the scanning elec-tron microscopy (SEM) of the cross section and the electrical properties of the devices were measured. The ON/OFF ratio is reached 10 s.(3) The study of the double-layer thin film electrical bistable device formed by layer by layer spin coating. The device exhibits better performances than the above mentioned two devices. The ON/OFF ratio is reached 104 s, and the retention time comes to 104 s. The theoretical analysis based on the experimental results has been conducted.