Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made a groundbreaking leap in computer data storage technology.
However, this new discovery is hardly visible.
On June 16, the lab announced it has found nano-sized, ferroelectric technology that will be smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less energy than data storage devices currently available.
“I really do believe that we’re tapping into the intrinsic property of nanoscale materials,” said Peter Maksymovych, ORNL Wigner Fellow and award-winning chemist.
Maksymovych and three other researchers have teamed up to uncover the potential of this new technology, which has never been experimentally proven to work.
“We are excited by our discovery and the prospect of finally being able to exploit the long-conjectured bi-stable electrical conductivity of ferroelectric materials,” Maksymovych said.
Working with material from the University of California, Berkeley, Maksymovych and his team has dispelled such concerns about the technology’s reliability.
The group’s findings open new possibilities for data storage, not just in compressing the physical size of media, but also in maintaining speed and retention of memory.
“Next generation memory needs to be non-volatile, non-destructive, energy-efficient and fast,” Maksymovych said.
He said in testing, the ferroelectric technology, even in this early stage of research, has already proven to be “fast, non-destructive and non-volatile.”
“It is as if we open a tiny door in the polar surface for electrons to enter,” Maksymovych said in a press release. “The size of this door is less than one-millionth of an inch, and it is very likely taking only one-billionth of a second to open.”