Molecular switch to boost memory density

According to Professor Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala, their work could allow 500,000Gbyte of data to be housed on 1sq in of substrate. Current technology is said to accommodate 3.3Gbyte on the same area. And, because the switches can work on carbon, the development may be suited to plastic electronics, rather than silicon based devices. Professor Cronin said: “We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32nm apart so they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule based switch that can be manipulated using an electric field. “By taking these nanoscale clusters, just a nanometer in size, and placing them onto a gold or carbon, we can control the switching ability. Not only is this a new type of switchable molecule, but by grafting the molecule on to metal (gold) or carbon, we can potentially bridge the gap between traditional semiconductor devices and components for nanoscale plastic electronics. Although the researchers have demonstrated the concept, they have yet to solve the fabrication problems or developed a means to address the memory. “Since these switches are little balls of metal oxide,” Prof Cronin noted, “they are made of similar stuff to normal semiconductors, but are much easier to manipulate as discrete molecular units.”