Nanoscale computer memory storage and data transmitting.

[Smoke]

Ritesh Agarwal, an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and colleagues developed a self-assembling nanowire of germanium antimony telluride, a phase-changing material that switches between amorphous and crystalline structures, the key to read/write computer memory.


Fabrication of the nanoscale devices, roughly 100 atoms in diameter, was performed without conventional lithography, the blunt, top-down manufacturing process that employs strong chemicals and often produces unusable materials with space, size and efficiency limitations.

Instead, researchers used self-assembly, a process by which chemical reactants crystallize at lower temperatures mediated by nanoscale metal catalysts to spontaneously form nanowires that were 30-50 nanometers in diameter and 10 micrometers in length, and then they fabricated memory devices on silicon substrates.

“We measured the resulting nanowires for write-current amplitude, switching speed between amorphous and crystalline phases, long-term durability and data retention time,” Agarwal said.

Tests showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (0.7mW per bit). They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash memory and indicated the device would not lose data even after approximately 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize terabit-level nonvolatile memory device density.

“This new form of memory has the potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data and even download entertainment as consumers,” Agarwal said. “This represents a potential sea-change in the way we access and store data.”

Phase-change memory in general features faster read/write, better durability and simpler construction compared with other memory technologies such as Flash. The challenge has been to reduce the size of phase change materials by conventional lithographic techniques without damaging their useful properties. Self-assembled phase-change nanowires, as created by Penn researchers, operate with less power and are easier to scale, providing a useful new strategy for ideal memory that provides efficient and durable control of memory several orders of magnitude greater than current technologies.

“The atomic scale of the nanodevices may represent the ultimate size limit in current-induced phase transition systems for non-volatile memory applications,” Agarwal said.

Current solid-state technology for products like memory cards, digital cameras and personal data assistants traditionally utilize Flash memory, a non-volatile and durable computer memory that can be erased and reprogrammed electronically. Data on Flash drives provides most battery-powered devices with acceptable levels of durability and moderately fast data access. Yet the technology’s limits are apparent. Digital cameras can’t snap rapid-fire photos because it takes precious seconds to store the last photo to memory. If the memory device is fast, as in DRAM and SRAM used in computers, then it is volatile; if the plug on a desktop computer is pulled, all recent data entry is lost.

Therefore, a universal memory device is desired that can be scalable, fast, durable and nonvolatile, a difficult set of requirements which have now been demonstrated at Penn.

“Imagine being able to store hundreds of high-resolution movies in a small drive, downloading them and playing them without wasting time on data buffering, or imagine booting your laptop computer in a few seconds as you wouldn’t need to transfer the operating system to active memory” Agarwal said.

Source

Sounds pretty amazing, if it is indeed feasable then it's going to revoloutionise the net. At least.

I love science.

 

[The Brick]

There are quite a few different solutions with the same capabilities discovered, this is just another. So far non of them made it into products yet.

 

[Smoke]

Well hopefully, some will. This kind of technology would change everything.

 

[Cheomesh]

Sadly we probably will not see it on the market for consumers for another 20 or 30 years :|

I say this because we seem to have a tendency to reject a "leap and bound" style advancement on the consumer market.

In the 1980's they had flash drives but when did we start seeing them for sale?

 

[Smoke]

Difference being we actually need this crap now, what with the world nearing many differing (and huge) problems. With more developing all the time, it makes sense to update as much as possible.

Although the economy would take a hit, that seems to be the only setback. STupid humans.

 

[Sulkdodds]

 

[kirovman]

No, not spectral energy densities! Gragh, they cause me to mutate into the Hulk.

Also, I guess the uptake on this will be relatively fast. Compared with say flight, which took about 30 - 60 years to become properly mass-commercial. And space-travel which has barely taken off yet, in terms of human cargo.