Electrochemical memory devices

Because all electrochemical devices such as batteries, fuel cells, sensors, and electrochromics require an electrolyte, the potential applications for ionic conductors are enormous. In addition to these more conventional applications, solid electrolyte materials are investigated for use as electrochemical memory devices, oxygen pumps, gas phase electrolyzers, and thermoelectric generators. ... 

Electrochemical potential memory devices were proposed by Takahashi and Yamamoto (1973) they have been extensively developed by Ikeda and Tada (1980) of the Sanyo Electric Company, Japan, and are commercially available. The device construction is... 

Fig. 11.34 Schematic diagram of an electrochemical potential memory device (Ikeda and Tada, 1980).

The immobilization of a photoisomerizable material that can be switched by light between redox-active and redox-inactive or conductive and insulating states offers an encouraging route toward integrated molecular memory devices. Figure 7.2 shows a photoisomer state A in which the molecular unit is redox-inactive and no electronic signal is transduced. Photoisomerization of the chemical component to state B generates a redox-active assembly, and the electron transfer between the electrode and the chemical modifier yields an amperometric (electrochemical) indicator of the state of the system. 

Solid-state electrochemistry is an important and rapidly developing scientific field that integrates many aspects of classical electrochemical science and engineering, materials science, solid-state chemistry and physics, heterogeneous catalysis, and other areas of physical chemistry. This field comprises - but is not limited to - the electrochemistry of solid materials, the thermodynamics and kinetics of electrochemical reactions involving at least one solid phase, and also the transport of ions and electrons in solids and interactions between solid, liquid and/or gaseous phases, whenever these processes are essentially determined by the properties of solids and are relevant to the electrochemical reactions. The range of applications includes many types of batteries and fuel cells, a variety of sensors and analytical appliances, electrochemical pumps and compressors, ceramic membranes with ionic or mixed ionic-electronic conductivity, solid-state electrolyzers and electrocatalytic reactors, the synthesis of new materials with improved properties and corrosion protection, supercapacitors, and electrochromic and memory devices. 

Wei, D., Baral, J. K., Osterbacka, R., and Ivaska, A. (2008). Electrochemical fabrication of a nonvolatile memory device based on polyaniline and gold particles./ Mater. Chem., 18, pp. 1853-1857. 

In addition to above discussed applications, doped and undoped CPs also find extensive use in the other areas (Figure 1.66) like DSSCs, field-effect transistors (FETs), TFTs, display devices, catalysis, ECs, water purification, electroactive materials (electrorheological fluids, actuators, artificial muscles), tissue engineering scaffolds, memory devices, photocatalysis (degradation and synthesis), thermoelectric generation, electrochemical batteries, etc. [15,16,39,52,54,56,57,61,62,67,82,84,107,109, 112,113,149,153,162,169,240,244,309,314,387,401,422,423,446,514, 516,546,547,550,557,567-571], some of them will be elaborated in details in the following chapters. 

Kuhr, W. G. 2004 Integration of molecular components into silicon memory devices. Interface (The Electrochemical Society) 13 34—38. 

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