Transparent memory devices show promise for electronics

The technique was reported on 2 October in Nature Communications.

The Rice team, led by chemist James Tour and physicist Douglas Natelson, is said to be making highly transparent, non-volatile resistive memory devices based on silicon oxide’s capability as a switch.

According to a statement, a voltage run across a thin sheet of silicon oxide strips oxygen atoms away from a 5nm-wide channel, turning it into conductive metallic silicon. With lower voltages, the channel can then be broken and repaired repeatedly, over thousands of cycles.

That channel can be read as a 1 or a 0 and, at 5nm, it shows promise to extend Moore’s Law, which predicted that computer circuitry will double in power every two years. Current advanced electronics are made with 22nm circuits.

The research — by Tour, Rice’s TT and WF Chao Chair in Chemistry, as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science; lead author Jun Yao, a former graduate student at Rice and now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard; Jian Lin, a Rice postdoctoral researcher; and their colleagues — details memories that are 95 per cent transparent and made of silicon oxide and crossbar graphene terminals on flexible plastic.