Terabyte Thumb Drive For Everyone

Researchers at Arizona State University have developed a low-cost (1/10 of Flash memory), low-power (1/1000 times more energy efficient as Flash memory) computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers’ pockets within a few years.

“A thumb drive using our memory could store a terabyte of information,” says Michael Kozicki, director of ASU’s Center for Applied Nanoionics.

The new memory technology, programmable metallization cell (PMC), stores information in a fundamentally different way from Flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus, by manipulating charged copper particles at the molecular scale, to record binary ones and zeros.

The research was published in October’s IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.
Source: Wired