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Researchers at HP and Rice University to solve microchip roadblock
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 02 September 2010, 15:42 IST |
2 Comments
Bangalore: Scientists at Hewlett- Packard and Rice University are reporting that they can overcome a fundamental barrier of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution.
HP might enter into a commercial partnership with a major semiconductor company to produce a related technology that also has the potential to push computer data storage to astronomical densities in the next decade.
HP and the Rice scientists are making what are called memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.
In one of the two new developments, researchers at Rice University in Houston are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches an essential part of computer memory that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods.
The advance is based on silicon oxide, a building block of the current chip industry, thus easing a move toward commercialization. The scientists said that PrivaTran, a Texas start-up company, had used the technique to make experimental chips that could store and retrieve information.
These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology fulfills the promise envisioned by its inventors, single chips that store as much as the highest capacity current disk drives could be possible in five years. The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers five billionths of a meter in width. That is thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using standard techniques. The initial discovery was made by Jun Yao, a graduate researcher at Rice.
IBM, Intel and other companies are already pursuing a competing technology called phase-change memory, which uses heat to transform a glassy material from an amorphous state to a crystalline one and back. Phase-change memory has been the most promising technology for so-called flash chips, which retain information after power, is switched off.
