On October 18, KAIST announced that Doctor Jin-Woo Han, who graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering in 2010, succeeded in developing resistive switching memory in cooperation with Doctor Meyya Meyyappan, Director of Ames' Center for Nanotechnology. It was a step towards the commercialization of smart fabrics and wearable electronics.

 

Smart fabrics are textiles that enable digital components and electronics to be embedded in them for computing. They allow for the incorporation of built-in technological elements in everyday textiles and clothes, promoting a higher quality of life. Once they are commercialized, smart fabrics should be widely used in the medical area, transferring biometrics of people who need constant, real-time feedback on their health to doctors. Seniors, soldiers, astronauts and patients with chronic diseases who need regular care and checkups are major beneficiaries.

 

The electronic textile, which contains a power generator, a battery, a sensor, a computational element and memory, is essential to the development of smart fabrics. Among the electronic components, the memory element in textile form has yet to be reported, though a flexible memory has been implemented on plastic substrates. 

 

Dr. Han and Dr. Meyyappan developed a preliminary resistive switching memory device on a metallic fiber, which can be easily embedded into textile because it consists of a network of orthogonal fibers and the cross-point contacts form inherently at each intersection.

 

CuxO, which is non-toxic and abundant on Earth, was selected as the storage medium. It showed superior retention time and excellent cyclic endurance compared to other candidates.

 

The memory circuit can be read and rewritten for more than 100 days. The number of cross-points determines the storage density. If the wire diameter and inter-wire spacing can be scaled down to 50 nm, a 1 cm by 1 cm area of the textile would contain approximately 10 Gigabytes of information. Dr. Han and Dr. Meyyanppan anticipate that further scaling to nano-levels in the future could dramatically increase the memory density.

 

The research was selected as the highlight topic in AIP Advances, a journal published by the American Institute of Physics, on September 21. Since then, it has received great attention from the press including publications like Popular Science, PC World and Indian News.