Atomically sharp interface enabled ultrahigh-speed non-volatile memory devices

The development of high-performance memory devices has played a key role in the innovation of modern electronics. Non-volatile memory devices have manifested high capacity and mechanical reliability as a mainstream technology; however, their performance has been hampered by low extinction ratio and slow operational speed. Despite substantial efforts to improve these characteristics, typical write times of hundreds of micro- or milliseconds remain a few orders of magnitude longer than that of their volatile counterparts. Here we demonstrate non-volatile, floating-gate memory devices based on van der Waals heterostructures with atomically sharp interfaces between different functional elements, achieving ultrahigh-speed programming/erasing operations in the range of nanoseconds with extinction ratio up to 10(10). This enhanced performance enables new device capabilities such as multi-bit storage, thus opening up applications in the realm of modern nanoelectronics and offering future fabrication guidelines for device scale up. Atomically sharp interfaces in van der Waals heterostructures enable the realization of ultrafast non-volatile memory devices.