HP Labs Creates Densest Memory Chips To Date

The advance announced Monday could lead to more memory within a smaller space than what is now possible.

"We believe molecular electronics will push advances in future computer technology far beyond the limits of silicon," said R. Stanley Williams, director of Quantum Science Research at HP Labs.

The high-tech industry's growth has been driven by packing more transistors -- or switches -- into smaller slivers of silicon. Within the next decade, however, current technology is expected to reach physical limits.

Researchers are looking for approaches that could continue the pace of innovation, yet without abandoning completely the industry's silicon foundation.

Williams, who presented his findings at a symposium for the 175th anniversary of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, said the high-density memory his team created fits inside a square micron. That's so small that 1,000 of the circuits could fit on the end of a strand of human hair.

The memory is rewritable -- held on an organic synthetic molecule -- and can preserve information even after voltage is cut. It behaves much like today's flash memory, commonly used in digital cameras, music players and cell phones to store information even after a device has been turned off.

The difference is that the new memory could be much cheaper to make.

Conventional semiconductor products are created by etching transistors into silicon by shining light onto light-sensitive chemicals. Williams' approach is more akin to contact printing used in creating vinyl records -- but at a very small scale.

The masters were created in about a day. They were then pressed into a polymer layer on a silicon wafer, and then into a single layer of electronically switchable molecules on top of the silicon. Such molecules switch on and off just like a standard transistor.

"It took just a few minutes to make an imprint," Williams said.

Still, the technology is at least five years from being commercially available, Williams said.

"Things are moving along faster than we anticipated," he said. "Even given that, we're just now demonstrating feasibility, and it's a long way from feasibility to product."

The demonstration memory holds about 64 bits of data, thousands of times smaller than the 128 megabytes in the much larger chips found in today's personal computers.

And the success rate for the manufacturing process was only about 20 percent. The biggest challenge was sticking -- something anyone who has fried an egg can understand.

"When we peeled the mold off, we had a material, or parts of the circuit, just literally pull away," he said. "That's a problem we have to address and improve in our processing."

Williams' group also built a simple logic circuit that can address specific areas of nanoscale memory.

"It's a necessary step in order to have a real memory made out of this technology," he said.

The work is "a very important step forward in a years-long effort," said James C. Ellenbogen, principal scientist in the Nanosystems Group at the MITRE Corp., a not-for-profit research company.

"This is certainly a really impressive step forward for them and the whole research program as well as for the entire electronics industry worldwide."

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