Ritesh Agarwal, Se-Ho Lee and Jung Yeonwoong have developed a self-assembling nanowire of germanium antimony telluride, a phase-change material that switches between amorphous and crystalline structures, the key to read and write computer memory. The fabrication of nanoscale devices, roughly 100 atoms in diameter, was performed without conventional lithography, the manufacturing process that uses a rather blunt harsh chemicals and often produces unusable materials with space limitations, size and efficiency.
Instead of conventional lithography, the researchers used self-assembly, a process in which chemical reactants crystallize at lower temperatures through the action of nanocatalysts metal to spontaneously form nanowires of 30-50 nm in diameter and 10 micrometers long, and then fabricated memory devices on silicon substrates.
The test results showed an extremely lower power consumption for data encoding (0.7 mW per bit). They have also shown that the writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) is a thousand times faster than conventional Flash memory. And even suggest that the device will not lose data after 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize non-volatile memory devices with densities of the order of terabits.
This new form of memory represents a potential revolution in the way we access and store information.
The phase-change memory in general, is characterized by a read / write faster, better durability and simpler construction compared with other technologies such as Flash memory. The challenge has been to reduce the size of phase change materials by conventional lithographic techniques without damaging their useful properties. The phase-change nanowires, as created by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, provide a useful strategy to achieve new reports that provide an ideal control of stored data efficiently and lasting several orders of magnitude higher than current technologies.
Instead of conventional lithography, the researchers used self-assembly, a process in which chemical reactants crystallize at lower temperatures through the action of nanocatalysts metal to spontaneously form nanowires of 30-50 nm in diameter and 10 micrometers long, and then fabricated memory devices on silicon substrates.
The test results showed an extremely lower power consumption for data encoding (0.7 mW per bit). They have also shown that the writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) is a thousand times faster than conventional Flash memory. And even suggest that the device will not lose data after 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize non-volatile memory devices with densities of the order of terabits.
This new form of memory represents a potential revolution in the way we access and store information.
The phase-change memory in general, is characterized by a read / write faster, better durability and simpler construction compared with other technologies such as Flash memory. The challenge has been to reduce the size of phase change materials by conventional lithographic techniques without damaging their useful properties. The phase-change nanowires, as created by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, provide a useful strategy to achieve new reports that provide an ideal control of stored data efficiently and lasting several orders of magnitude higher than current technologies.
0 comments:
Post a Comment