A flexible, transparent memory chip created by researchers at Rice University. Courtesy Tour Lab/Rice University |
Want
a see-through cellphone you can wrap around your wrist? Such a thing
may be possible before long, according to Rice University chemist James
Tour, whose lab has developed transparent, flexible memories using
silicon oxide as the active component.
Tour
revealed today in a talk at the national meeting and exposition of the
American Chemical Society in San Diego that the new type of memory could
combine with the likes of transparent electrodes developed at Rice for
flexible touchscreens and transparent integrated circuits and batteries
developed at other labs in recent years.
Details of the Rice breakthrough will be published in an upcoming paper, Tour said.
“Generally,
you can’t see a bit of memory, because it’s too small,” said Tour,
Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of
mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science.
“But silicon itself is not transparent. If the density of the circuits
is high enough, you’re going to see it.”
Rice’s
transparent memory is based upon the 2010 discovery that pushing a
strong charge through standard silicon oxide, an insulator widely used
in electronics, forms channels of pure silicon crystals less than 5 nm
wide. The initial voltage appears to strip oxygen atoms from the silicon
oxide; lesser charges then repeatedly break and reconnect the circuit
and turn it into nonvolatile memory. A smaller signal can be used to
poll the memory state without altering it.
That
discovery was reported on the front page of the New York Times. The
Rice lab has since developed a working two-terminal memory device that
can be stacked in a three-dimensional configuration and attached to a
flexible substrate.
Silicon oxide memory coverage in the New York Times
Transparent integrated circuits
ACS Spring 2012 Exposition and National Meeting
Source: Rice University
