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posted by martyb on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the gonna-need-ultra-thin-cooling dept.

Engineers worldwide have been developing alternative ways to provide greater memory storage capacity on even smaller computer chips. Previous research into two-dimensional atomic sheets for memory storage has failed to uncover their potential -- until now.

A team of electrical engineers at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with Peking University scientists, has developed the thinnest memory storage device with dense memory capacity, paving the way for faster, smaller and smarter computer chips for everything from consumer electronics to big data to brain-inspired computing.

"For a long time, the consensus was that it wasn't possible to make memory devices from materials that were only one atomic layer thick," said Deji Akinwande, associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "With our new 'atomristors,' we have shown it is indeed possible."

Made from 2-D nanomaterials, the "atomristors" -- a term Akinwande coined -- improve upon memristors, an emerging memory storage technology with lower memory scalability. He and his team published their findings in the January issue of Nano Letters.

"Atomristors will allow for the advancement of Moore's Law at the system level by enabling the 3-D integration of nanoscale memory with nanoscale transistors on the same chip for advanced computing systems," Akinwande said.

Source:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117114918.htm

Journal Reference:

Ruijing Ge, Xiaohan Wu, Myungsoo Kim, Jianping Shi, Sushant Sonde, Li Tao, Yanfeng Zhang, Jack C. Lee, Deji Akinwande. Atomristor: Nonvolatile Resistance Switching in Atomic Sheets of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides. Nano Letters, 2017; 18 (1): 434 DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b04342


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:17PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:17PM (#624259) Journal

    IIUC, though, those are devices that don't require power to stay in operation. Like flash or core memory. That kind of device doesn't have the same heat extraction limit as do dynamic devices.

    OTOH, this suggests a stack of static memory with a dynamic CPU built on top of it. Get this down to atomic scale (well, nano-scale, but they're calling the things atomistors) and you're coming reasonably close to "computronium". But for this to work you really need to get your defect count down. The summary also doesn't talk about speed, so I'm going to guess that it's not extremely fast memory. Short transmission paths make up for a lot, but device speed can still dominate.

    So what I'm seeing is the promise of "grain of rice" or even "mustard seed" sized controllers for IoT devices. Quite important, but not exactly something I'm looking forwards to. And 15-20 years from now.

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