Researchers Develop Technology to Make Terabyte Thumb Drives Possible

Boffins at Arizona University have developed a new process that will allow the production of low cost, energy efficient, high capacity memory. High capacity refers to the ability to construct an economically viable terabyte thumb drive. The new technique relies upon making changes to copper particles at the molecular level. The end result is a new memory standard that costs one-tenth the price of traditional flash memory, and is a staggering 1000 times more energy efficient. Michael Kozicki (pictured), director of ASU’s Center for Applied Nanoionics, whose team was behind the development, said:

“All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it.”

The new procedure is called programmable metallization cell (PMC) technology, and it is hoped memory produced in this fashion will be a lot more stable than the flash based alternative.

PMC functions by creating nanowires from copper atoms to store binary ones and zeros, which is in contrast to the traditional method that stores binary information as electronic charges. The business spin-off group behind the new advancement, Axon technologies, has already procured considerable interest from nanotechnology experts Micron Technology, Qimonda and Adesto. The first product containing the new memory is penciled in for release in 18 months time. Prof. Kozicki may not be smiling in the picture, but he might be in 18 months time when his work comes to fruition. For an excellent and thorough insight into the teams work at Arizona University, check out the full article over at Wired. [Wired]