Moore’s law, named after one of the co-founders of Intel, states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. Unfortunately, as features on chips continue to shrink, there comes a point where we begin to bump against basic physics, according to Wired.
Flash memory, which is essential to virtually all of the electronics that we use on a daily basis, is held back by the physical limits of data cells. Currently, the cells use metal-oxide-semiconductor components, which are virtually impossible to manufacture at a scale below ten nanometers, which sets an upper limit on how much information can be stored.
The good news is that, according to Ars Technica, researchers are currently working on a flash device that included layers of graphene and molybdenum disulfide, both of which form molecular sheets a single atom thick. The problem is that these devices required several layers of these materials in order to work, so the charge ended up stored in several stacked sheets.
The international team of researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Schools of Chemistry and Engineering and Rovira i Virgili University in Spain have created a potential solution to these problems using metal-oxide clusters known as polyoxometalates.
“Conventional flash memory uses transistors whose design allows them to ‘remember’ whether they have been turned on or off after they’ve been removed from a power source,” said Professor Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and leader of the research team, as quoted by Phys.org. “Those transistors’ positions correspond to binary, allowing data to be stored.”
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