11-11/12 :: November/December 2011

nanotimes News in Brief

At 2011 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), imec presented the world’s smallest, fully- functional HfO2-based Resistive RAM (RRAM) cell, with an area of less than 10x10nm² with an excellent reliability (endurance of more than 109cycles). The cell has fast nanosecond-range on/ off switching times at low-voltages. It has a large resistive window (>50) and shows no closure of the on/off window after functioning at 200° C (392° F) for 30 hours. The device even remained operating failure-free functioning for 30 hours with a thermal stress of 250° C (482° F). The switching energy per bit is below 0.1pJ, and AC operating voltages are well below 3V.

The new cell shows potential to meet the major requirements for future device-level nonvolatile memory. RRAM is an emerging technology for nonvolatile memory, a candidate to replace NAND Flash technology in the scaling race to sub-10nm memories.

http://www.imec.be

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© ICREA / Victor Puntes

double-walled open boxes with pores, multiwalled/ multichamber boxes, double-walled, porous and multichamber nanotubes, nanoframes, noble metal fullerenes, and others.

After several years of research, scientists of the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (ICN), Dr. Edgar Emir González (currently at Instituto Ge- ofísico Universidad Javeriana y Universidad Santo Tomás) and ICREA Prof. Victor Puntes in collabora- tion with ICREA Prof. Jordi Arbiol of the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), have successfully demonstrated a new method for producing a wide variety of complex hollow nano- particles. A wide range of structures can be formed, including open boxes, bimetallic and trimetallic

The researcher have refined methods based on tra- ditional corrosion techniques (the Kirkendall effect and galvanic, pitting, etching and de-alloying cor- rosion processes). They show that these methods, which are far more aggressive at the nanoscale than in bulk materials due to the higher surface area of nanostructures, provide interesting pathways for the production of new and exotic materials.

Edgar Gonzàlez, Jordi Arbiol, Victor Puntes: Carving at the Nanoscale: Sequential Galvanic Exchange and Kir- kendall Growth at Room Temperature, In: Science, 334 num.6061, 1377-1380 - DOI:10.1126/science.1212822: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1212822

http://www.nanocat.org/index.php/en/research/core- research/inorganic-nanoparticles/overview