For Ultra-Dense Memory, Just Add Water To Nanostructures

May 3, 2006

Generally speaking, electronics and water don’t mix well. But a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Harvard University has proposed a new and surprisingly effective means of stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in nanostructures. By using water to terminate the nanostructures’ surfaces, the researchers believe that ferroelectric nanostructures can be tamed to create extremely dense memory devices.

According to Jonathan Spanier, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel, he and his colleagues have successfully demonstrated the benefits of using water to stabilize memory bits in segments of oxide nanowires that are only about 3 billionths of a meter wide. Though a scheme for the dense arrangement and addressing of these nanowires remains to be developed, such an approach would enable a storage density of more than 100,000 Tbits per cubic centimeter. If this memory density can be realized commercially, a device the size of an iPod nano could hold enough MP3 music to play for 300,000 years without repeating a song or enough DVD quality video to play movies for 10,000 years without repetition.

University of Pennsylvania
www.upenn.edu

About the Author

David Maliniak

MWRF Executive Editor

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.