Chennai: The world’s smallest memory storage device has been created by engineers at the University of Texas at Austin. They have developed this based on a discovery from two years ago.
The research was published recently in Nature Nanotechnology. According to the scientists, the new invention will help build faster, smaller, smarter and more energy-efficient chips for everything from consumer electronics to big data to brain-inspired computing.
In this new work, the researchers reduced the size even further, shrinking the cross section area down to just a single square nanometer. And in the process, they figured out the physics dynamic that unlocks dense memory storage capabilities for these tiny devices.
Deji Akinwande, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said, “When a single additional metal atom goes into that nanoscale hole and fills it, it confers some of its conductivity into the material, and this leads to a change or memory effect.”