Much interest has been shown in the use of tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) deposited by filtered cathodic arc as an inexpensive, easily produced, wide band-gap semicon-ductor in the fabrication of electronic devices. There has, however, been limited success in producing devices with properties that might make its use in electronic applications commercially viable, which in part may be due to the high density of electronic trap states as reflected in ta-C's rather high ESR signal of approx 10~(20) spin/g. Recent results at the University of Sydney suggest, however, that a new range of possibilities exist in the utilisation of these traps as a means of producing nonvolatile digital information storage. Devices with write times of 100 mu s, read times of 100 ns, and effective memory retention times approaching 1 year, have been fabricated.
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