Rice University Researchers Develop Transparent Memory Chips
Posted on March 28, 2012
Researchers at Rice University's Tour Lab have developed flexible, transparent memory chips, like the one pictured above. This technology could lead to new devices, such as a thin see-through cellphone that you could wrap around your wrist.
Rice University chemist James Tour, whose lab developed the transparent chips using silicon oxide as the active component, says the new type of memory could combine with the likes of transparent electrodes developed at Rice for flexible touchscreens and transparent integrated circuits and batteries developed at other labs in recent years. The details will be published in an upcoming paper.
Tour says, "Generally, you can't see a bit of memory, because it's too small. But silicon itself is not transparent. If the density of the circuits is high enough, you're going to see it."
Rice's transparent memory is based upon the 2010 discovery that pushing a strong charge through standard silicon oxide, an insulator widely used in electronics, forms channels of pure silicon crystals less than 5 nanometers wide. This discovery was first reported, here, on the New York Times, in August, 2010. Since then the Rice lab has developed a working two-terminal memory device that can be stacked in a three-dimensional configuration and attached to a flexible substrate.