sci.energy

excerpt
Instead, researchers used self-assembly, a process by which
chemical reactants crystallize at lower temperatures mediated by
nanoscale metal catalysts to spontaneously form nanowires that were
30-50 nanometers in diameter and 10 micrometers in length, and then
they fabricated memory devices on silicon substrates.

"We measured the resulting nanowires for write-current amplitude,
switching speed between amorphous and crystalline phases, long-term
durability and data retention time," Agarwal said.

Tests showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (
per bit). They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval
(50 nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash
memory and indicated the device would not lose data even after
approximately 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize
terabit-level nonvolatile memory device density.



Therefore, a universal memory device is desired that can be scalable,
fast, durable and nonvolatile, a difficult set of requirements which
have now been demonstrated at Penn.

"Imagine being able to store hundreds of high-resolution movies in a
small drive, downloading them and playing them without wasting time on
data buffering, or imagine booting your laptop computer in a few
seconds as you wouldn't need to transfer the operating system to
active memory" Agarwal said.