Bring me the horizon. Or faster and more power-efficient chips, one of the two.
Every now and then, I come across a tech development that makes me feel like I’m living in the future, and this is one of those moments. A team of scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai have published a study detailing their latest achievement, a fully functional memory chip built with integrated 2D materials a few atoms thick. Yesssss. This is the Star Trek-level technology I was promised as a child.
Well, maybe that’s jumping the gun a bit. Still, the achievement here is incredibly impressive (via Tom’s Hardware). Essentially, the researcher’s new Atom2chip process allowed them to flow a layer of molybdenum disulphide, functioning as a memory array, on top of a 0.13 micrometre CMOS silicon chip—fusing together an emerging atomic-scale, «2D» technology with traditional methods to create a working hybrid memory chip.
The chip-riding 2D flash memory array is able to communicate with the CMOS chip’s control logic via a custom interface, which in turn means that instruction-driven operations, 32-bit parallelism and random access instructions can be swapped between the two.
