Solution-Processed Black Phosphorus Film-Based Volatile Memristor for Encryption Applications

Herein, the W/BP/Mg volatile memristor was prepared based on solution-processed layered black phosphorus (BP) nanosheet thin films. The device exhibits threshold switching (TS) characteristics with random threshold voltage (Vth). The partial stacking of BP nanosheet during film formation process maximized the electrical randomness, which achieved the inter-chip Hamming distance (HD) and the correlation coefficient (CC) of Vth among memristor arrays close to the ideal values. Subsequently, the key generated by the randomly distributed Vth was used to encrypt the image blocks according to the bit-XOR logic. The low correlation between the pixels of the encrypted image indicated that the hardware encryption algorithm had good performance. It further showed that the volatile memristor based on BP is an effective strategy to enhance the image encryption technology.