Electrical resistivity optimization of diamond-like carbon thin film for electrical probe storage application

Abstract

Today, the total amount of global data has been increasing at a phenomenal rate, and this necessitates the requirement for significant improvement in the storage capacity of current storage devices. Compared with other conventional storage devices, electrical probe memory exhibits several storage superiorities and is considered as the candidate for the next-generation mainstreaming storage device. In this case, to further mitigate the performances of the electrical probe memory, its architecture was previously optimized by simulation while lacking adequate experimental support. Therefore, we measured the electrical resistivities of the diamond-like carbon (DLC) capping and bottom layers by varying the film thickness, sputter power, and sputter pressure to thus establish the physically realistic property values of the DLC film. According to experiments, a 10 nm DLC capping layer with a resistivity of 0.1 Ω·m, and a 30 nm DLC bottom layer with a resistivity of 0.01 Ω·m, which most closely matches the theoretical prediction, are introduced into the originally designed electrical probe memory, and the subsequent recording experiment demonstrated the ability to achieve ultra-high density, large data rate, and ultra-low energy consumption using the redesigned architecture.

Keywords

• crystallization
• diamond-like carbon
• electrical probe memory
• energy consumption
• phase transformation