Nuno Miguel de Almeida Casa Branca

Nuno Casa Branca completed his Integrated MSc degree in Micro and Nanotechnology Engineering in 2019 at Nova School of Science and Technology. His MSc Thesis was entitled: “Memristor based on amorphous Zin-Tin oxide Schottky diodes”, was carried out at CENIMAT|i3N, and involved the fabrication of thin film ZTO-based two-terminal-devices exclusively by Physical deposition techniques. Characterization at the active electrode interface was performed by X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), and electrical performance characterization was carried out using a Keythley 4200 by first exploring the pristine Schottky diode operation, and later as both unipolar or bipolar Memristors, depending on the Electroforming procedure and polarity utilized.

From 2020 to 2022, Nuno was part of MANIC: “Materials for Neuromorphic Circuits”, which is a project funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN Programme. He performed his research at the Electronic Materials division of Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-7) at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH. The main topic of research was the study of the natural volatile decay of amorphous Memristor devices based on Strontium Titanate (STO) thin films fabricated using Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD).

He is now attending the PhD in Nanotechnologies and Nanosciences at Cenimat|i3N at Nova School of Science and Technology within the scope of the project “TERRAMETA”, which aims to explore conductive bridge resistive switching memories (CBReRAMs) consisting of oxide multi-layer systems, and fabricated using a layer-by-layer growth approach by atomic layer deposition (ALD) for applications in radio frequency (RF) switches.