There is a strong desire to develop new, advanced materials that can overcome the scaling difficulties present in current memory devices. Organic materials are promising candidates for resistive switching memory devices due to their low-cost advantage, simplified manufacturing process, compatibility with flexible electronic devices, and ease of being constructed cross-point cell array architecture. The operation of these types of devices requires change of device resistance when subjected to an electrical bias. We study three different systems that can achieve this requirement, wherein one is believed to be related to the charge storage in metallic trapping site, inducing space-charge field, inhibiting the charge injection; another exhibits negative differential resistance (NDR) characteristics; and the electrical transition of the third one is believed to be attributed to the formation of filaments. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-85). Also available via the Internet.

Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is a known technique to increase the data rate without increasing the channel bandwidth when implementing error correction coding. TCM is a combination of M-ary modulation and error correction coding. This thesis investigates the performance of a low spectral efficiency TCM system, which is compared with three alternative systems having comparable bandwidth. The three alternative systems are all non-TCM systems and consist of QPSK with independent r=1/2 error correction coding on the in-phase and quadrature components, 8-ary biorthogonal keying (8-BOK) with r=2/3 error correction coding, and 16-BOK with r=3/4 error correction coding. The effects of both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and pulse-noise interference (PNI) are considered. The TCM system shows much better than expected performance and significant resistance to PNI, and performance improves as the number of memory element increases. The alternative QPSK system with soft decision decoding (SDD) experiences significant degradation with PNI. The 8-BOK with r=2/3 error correction and 16-BOK with r=3/4 error correction systems occupy approximately the same bandwidth as the TCM system and show better performance in PNI than the alternative QPSK system.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-131).

Thesis (M.S.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Title from t.p. of PDF file (viewed June 1, 2010). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-131).

A study of the degradation of ferroelectric properties in Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) thin film capacitors is presented in this work. Metal- Ferroelectric - Metal capacitors were prepared by sputtering and metal organic decomposition (MOD) techniques. Samples with several different film thicknesses were considered in this study. Depolarization, leading to imprint has been studied at various temperatures. Changes in the dielectric properties of the capacitors as a function of the number of fatigue cycles is presented. Impedance and modulus spectroscopic techniques have been applied to study the effect of degradation on the ferroelectric thin film. It has been shown that with accurate low frequency impedance measurement equipment, new insight can be gained on the mechanisms of degradation in ferroelectric capacitors. / Master of Science