Flexible, bendable, wearable and disposable

The flexible and printable electronic industry is continually growing and is now important to various consumer electronic devices. The interest in this market is mainly down to two reasons. Firstly, the ability to use flexible substrates such as metal foils and plastic sheets will introduce new futuristic products, including rollable displays, sensors or even wearable electronics and artificial skin. Secondly, the cost in fabrication and production line of electronic devices is drastically lower than existing silicon and other wafer-based technologies. Among other advantages, those devices will be lighter, conformably shaped and durable. Electronic memory devices are associated with modern electronic products, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. There is a demand for a memory that can cope with all the new requirements of these products and researchers are looking into the possibility of building a ‘universal memory’. Some of the characteristics will need to be low cost, high speed, high capacity, scalability, nonvolatility and low power consumption. We are currently in an exploratory stage to discover the potential for electronic memory materials and devices. The primary aim in an electronic memory device is to produce structures that exhibit two distinct states when a certain type of stimulus is applied – for example, electrical field in flash memory and magnetic field in magnetic hard-drives. These two states can be seen as the realisation of memory devices