Researchers have developed general-purpose data storage devices that use less energy

Researchers at the university of Lancaster in the UK recently announced that they have teamed up with their Spanish counterparts to develop a new type of data storage device that combines the advantages of current memory and flash memory devices with extremely low power consumption.

The university said in a press release that the new device is a general-purpose memory that can act as active memory for read-and-write at any time and can also hold data for long periods of time.It will help save energy and ease the "digital energy crisis". It will also improve the experience of using electronic devices, such as computers, which can be booted up in seconds.

Dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which is currently used for memory, can read and write fast, but it is volatile, that is, the content will disappear after a sudden power failure, even if the power is constantly refreshed every few milliseconds, the total energy consumption is very high.Data in flash memory can be stored for long periods of time at the expense of writing and erasing that require high voltage, high power consumption, slow speed, and easy corruption.A new type of memory with non - volatile, low energy consumption and high speed is a research hotspot.

Writing in the new issue of the British journal scientific reports, the researchers said the device USES a floating gate structure similar to flash memory, but instead of using metal oxide semiconductors, as flash does, it consists of indium arsenide, aluminum antimonide and gallium antimonide.Its bottom is 630 nanometre thick gallium antimonide, above is a number of staggered aluminum antimonide and indium arsenide thin layer, thickness from a few nanometers to dozens of nanometers, showing "thousand layer cake" like heterostructure.

Experiments have found that the quantum mechanical properties of the three semiconductor materials allow the new device to operate at low voltage while achieving non-volatile storage.Because of the low voltage and capacitance requirements, the device USES one hundredth of the energy per unit area of DRAM and one thousandth of flash memory, respectively.In addition, it needs to refresh at least a million times longer than DRAM, and the lifetime of its data is theoretically longer than the age of the universe.

With the development of information technology, computers and other electronic devices need to deal with more and more data, and the storage capacity is growing rapidly. However, the problem of storage energy consumption seriously restricts the operation efficiency and use experience.Researchers say the technology has great potential as a new type of storage device.