A Biodegradable Gelatin Substrate and its Application for Crack Suppression of Flexible Gelatin Resistive Memory Device

Abstract In this work, gelatin is used not only as a substrate for the memory device but also as the resistive layer. This lightweight gelatin substrate (GS) will retain all of the desirable properties of plastic substrates, with the added advantages of being renewable, biodegradable, and inexpensive. GS is totally degraded after 18 days, showing excellent biodegradability in dry soil that can reduce the environmental impact effectively. Moreover, due to the substrate and resistive layer used of the same materials, it can be observed by the scanning electron microscope analysis that the films on GS both have smooth interfaces regardless of the gelatin layer or Ag electrodes after bending 1000 cycles. A strong interfacial adhesion leads to an efficient stress transfer underload, resulting in better structural stability and bending performance of the In/gelatin/Ag/GS device than those of the In/gelatin/Ag/PET device. The In/gelatin/Ag/GS device shows a stable retention time of more than 10 3 s and uniform current distribution, as well as the device with bending stress is capable to execute the ON/OFF ratio of over 10 4 . This result exhibits the fabricating processes without a vacuum system and has broaden the application study of gelatin.