Chinese researchers find new mechanism for ultrahigh-speed memory devices

BEIJING - Chinese researchers have discovered a new mechanism to develop non-volatile memory devices with ultrahigh speed, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on Tuesday.

The development of high-performance memory devices has played a key role in modern electronic innovation. Non-volatile memory devices, including read-only memory (ROM) and flash memory, have high capacity and mechanical reliability. But their performance has been hampered by low extinction ratio and low operational speed.

A research team from the Institute of Physics developed non-volatile floating-gate memory devices with ultrahigh speed, based on van der Waals heterostructures with atomically sharp interfaces between different functional elements, with extinction ratio up to 10 billion.

Such memory devices can achieve reading and writing operations within the range of 20 nanoseconds, and keep data for at least ten years. The current commercial flash memory devices read and write data within the range of 100 microseconds, or 100,000 nanoseconds.

Van der Waals heterostructures are made by stacking different layered materials, and can be employed in research fields ranging from materials science to electrochemistry.

The research, funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology, and CAS, was published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Monday.