Electrochemical synthesis and functional analysis of self-assembled Au-decorated polypyrrole for non-volatile memory and bio-inspired computing

Functional and low-cost switching materials are necessary to sustain the development of data storage and brain-inspired computing technologies. Polypyrrole (PPy) is one of the potential organic polymer materials for resistive switching (RS) applications. Given this, the present work reports the electrochemical synthesis of PPy and gold (Au) decorated PPy (Au-PPy) switching layers for non-volatile memory and neuromorphic computing applications. Among two switching layer materials, the Au decorated PPy (Ag/Au-PPy/Pt) shows good bipolar RS properties in terms of cyclic stability (16,000 cycles), memory retention (6000 s), and memory window (>60). Moreover, Ag/Au-PPy/Pt device realistically mimic the various bio-synaptic properties such as potentiation, depression, excitatory post-synaptic current (EPSC), and paired-pulse facilitation (PPF) index (%) as compared to Ag/PPy/Pt device. The double-valued charge-flux relation asserted that both devices are non-ideal memristors. Various statistical techniques such as cumulative probability, Weibull distribution, and time series analysis techniques were utilized to understand, model, and predict the switching variation of both devices. Moreover, the cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) techniques were probed to understand the RS process of the devices. The conduction and plausible RS mechanisms of the optimized device were also reported. The results of the present work assert that the Au-decorated PPy is a potential organic polymer material for data storage and neuromorphic computing applications.