Advancing resistive memory to improve portable electronics

Researchers develop novel way to build resistive memory devices that could become the storage part of the next generation of smart phones and tablets

2013-08-14

(Press-News.org) RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A team at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering has developed a novel way to build what many see as the next generation memory storage devices for portable electronic devices including smart phones, tablets, laptops and digital cameras.

The device is based on the principles of resistive memory, which can be used to create memory cells that are smaller, operate at a higher speed and offer more storage capacity than flash memory cells, the current industry standard. Terabytes, not gigbytes, will be the norm with resistive memory.

The key advancement in the UC Riverside research is the creation of a zinc oxide nano-island on silicon. It eliminates the need for a second element called a selector device, which is often a diode.

"This is a significant step as the electronics industry is considering wide-scale adoption of resistive memory as an alternative for flash memory," said Jianlin Liu, a professor of electrical engineering at UC Riverside who is one of the authors of the paper. "It really simplifies the process and lowers the fabrication cost."

The findings were published online this week in the journal Scientific Reports, which is part of Nature Publishing Group. The paper is called "Multimode Resistive Switching in Single ZnO Nanoisland System."

Liu's co-authors were: Jing Qi, a former visiting scholar in Liu's lab and now an associate professor at Lanzhou University in China; Mario Olmedo, who earned his Ph.D. from UC Riverside and now works at Intel; and Jian-Guo Zheng, a director of the Laboratory of Electron and X-ray Instrumentation at UC Irvine.

Flash memory has been the standard in the electronics industry for decades. But, as flash continues to get smaller and users want higher storage capacity, it appears to reaching the end of its lifespan, Liu said.

With that in mind, resistive memory is receiving significant attention from academia and the electronics industry because it has a simple structure, high-density integration, fast operation and long endurance.

Researchers have also found that resistive memory can be scaled down in the sub 10-nanometer scale. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.) Current flash memory devices are roughly using a feature size twice as large.

Resistive memory usually has a metal-oxide-metal structure in connection with a selector device. The UC Riverside team has demonstrated a novel alternative way by forming self-assembled zinc oxide nano-islands on silicon. Using a conductive atomic force microscope, the researchers observed three operation modes from the same device structure, essentially eliminating the need for a separate selector device.

INFORMATION:

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

6 months of fish oil reverses liver disease in children with intestinal failure, study shows

2013-08-14

Children who suffer from intestinal failure, most often caused by a shortened or dysfunctional bowel, are unable to consume food orally. Instead, a nutritional cocktail of sugar, protein and fat made from soybean oil is injected through a small tube in their vein. For these children, the intravenous nutrition serves as a bridge to bowel adaptation, a process by which the intestine recovers and improves its capacity to absorb nutrition. But the soybean oil, which provides essential fatty acids and calories, has been associated with a potentially lethal complication known ...

NTU-led research shows Burmese long-tailed macaques' ability using stone tools threatened by human activity in Thailand

2013-08-14

Human farming and the introduction of domestic dogs are posing a threat to the ability of Burmese long-tailed macaques to use stone tools. This was found in a study led by Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) carried out at Thailand's Laem Son National Park. The research team has advised Thailand's authorities that in the management of their marine national parks they should pay closer attention to macaques' use of stones as tools. Burmese long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea) are a rare variety of the common long-tailed macaques of Southeast ...

E-Health services ill-prepared for epidemics

2013-08-14

National and international organizations are ill-prepared to exploit e-health systems in the event of the emergence of a major pandemic disease, according to a research paper to be published in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology. E-health systems and associated information technology could radically alter the course of a pandemic disease, such as a major outbreak of influenza internationally. It could provide healthcare workers, emergency services, patients and those at-risk with access to much-needed data on how disease is spreading and ...

Xingnao Jieyu capsules are similar to fluoxetine for post-stroke depression

2013-08-14

The occurrence of post-stroke depression results from the effects of biological, psychological, and social factors, likely involving neurotransmitters, neuroendocrine effects, nerve anatomy, neurotrophic factors, neural regeneration, inflammatory reactions, and social psyche factors. Synaptotagmin promotes neurotransmitter release, regulates the transfer of synaptic vesicle to synaptic active zones, and is a key factor in information transfer among neurons. The Xingnao Jieyu capsule has been shown to effectively relieve neurologic impairments and lessen depression. It remains ...

Bacteria in drinking water are key to keeping it clean

2013-08-14

Research at the University of Sheffield, published in the latest issue of Water Science and Technology: Water Supply, points the way to more sophisticated and targeted methods of ensuring our drinking water remains safe to drink, while still reducing the need for chemical treatments and identifying potential hazards more quickly. The research team, from the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering, studied four bacteria found in the city's drinking water to see which combinations were more likely to produce a 'biofilm'. Biofilms are layers of bacteria which form ...

Post-traumatic stress disorder in a rescue group after the Wenchuan earthquake relief

2013-08-14

Previous studies have suggested that the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder in earthquake rescue workers is relatively high. Risk factors for this disorder include demographic characteristics, earthquake-related high-risk factors, risk factors in the rescue process, personality, social support and coping style. A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 20, 2013) examined the current status of a unit of 1 040 rescue workers who participated in earthquake relief for the Wenchuan earthquake that occurred on May 12th, 2008. According ...

Electrochemical step towards a better hydrogen storage

2013-08-14

Good metal-based systems for hydrogen storage cannot be developed without knowing how this element permeates through metals. Researchers at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw managed to apply a user-friendly electrochemical method to study hydrogen diffusion in highly reactive metals. Hydrogen is seen as a versatile energy carrier for the future. Unfortunately, the element practically does not occur in the free state on Earth. Therefore, it must be first generated (e.g., by electrolysis of water), then stored, to be finally ...

Acellular nerve graft and stem cells for repair of long-segment sciatic nerve defects

2013-08-14

Peripheral nerve defects are very common in clinical surgery. For repair of short-segment nerve defects, freeing nerve, nerve diversions or joint flexion can be used to directly connect the two stumps of nerves by using microsurgical techniques; while for long-segment nerve defects, we require a bridging material to bridge defected nerves. Nerve allograft is the most similar to autologous nerve in structure with rich sources. Antigenicity-free nerve allografts which retain the natural three-dimensional structure will become ideal scaffold materials for tissue-engineered ...

Research shows precisely which strategies help players win team-oriented video games

2013-08-14

Computer science researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique to determine which strategies give players an edge at winning in multi-player (action) real-time strategy (ARTS) games, such as Defense of the Ancients (DotA), Warcraft III and Starcraft II. The technique offers extremely precise information about how a player's actions affect a team's chances of winning, and could be used to develop technology for use by players and developers to improve gameplay experiences. Researchers used the technique, which makes use of various analytic ...

Memory breakthrough could bring faster computing, smaller memory devices and lower power consumption

2013-08-14

Memory devices like disk drives, flash drives and RAM play an important role in our lives. They are an essential component of our computers, phones, electronic appliances and cars. Yet current memory devices have significant drawbacks: dynamic RAM memory has to be refreshed periodically, static RAM data is lost when the power is off, flash memory lacks speed, and all existing memory technologies are challenged when it comes to miniaturization. Increasingly, memory devices are a bottleneck limiting performance. In order to achieve a substantial improvement in computation ...