Controlled Reduction of Bionanodots for Better Charge Storage Characteristics of Bionanodots Flash Memory

Abstract

We proposed a new process technology, named the "bio-nano-process", in which semiconductor processing technology and biotechnology are conbined. We utilized a ferritin protein cobalt core as a memory node, and succeeded in performing the operation of floating gate memory. In this study, we undertook the reduction control of a cobalt core embedded in silicon oxide by thermal annealing. We also fabricated metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors with using the cobalt core and evaluated their electronic properties. As a result, we could elucidate the contribution of the metallic cobalt in the core by controlling of the ambient and temperature. We found that memory windows become large with increasing contribution of metallic cobalt. (C) 2009 The Japan Society of Applied Physics