New York, November 24, 2008
The Economic Times (Bangalore edition)
Rice University researchers, who are currently developing the device, said the solid-state device takes advantage of the conducting properties of graphene and would have many advantages over today’s state-of-the-art flash memory and other new technologies.
Graphene memory would increase the amount of storage in a two-dimensional array by a factor of five, said James Tour, who led the research team.
This is so because individual bits could be made smaller than 10 nanometres, compared to the 45-nanometre circuitry in today’s flash memory chips.
Findings of the new research have been published online in the journal Nature Materials. Being essentially a mechanical device, such chips will consume virtually no power while keeping data intact — much the same way today’s e-book readers keep the image of a page visible even when the power is off.
What distinguishes graphene from other next-generation memories is the on-off power ratio — the amount of power a circuit holds when it’s on, as opposed to off. “It’s huge - a million-to-one,” said Tour. “Phase change memory, the other thing the industry is considering, runs at 10-to-1. That means the ‘off’ state holds, say, one-tenth the amount of electrical current than the ‘on’ state.”
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