Future of Engineering

A university's work on electricity conduction could significantly boost storage.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh say they have invented a method to switch electricity on and off at nano-scale dimensions. The invention could lead to the creation of more compact data storage devices by increasing aerial density between data bits on silicon.

The project, headed by Jeremy Levy, a professor in the university's School of Arts and Sciences, sought to create a new process to control the connectivity between insulating materials from an electrical conductor to an insulator and then back again.

In an interview, Levy said the principle could be refined to allow for the development of very powerful and tightly packed ultra-high-density storage devices for logic and memory devices.
The results of the project, known as "nanoscale control of an interfacial metal-insulator transition at room temperature," were published last week on the Web site of Nature Materials magazine.

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Labels: Electrical-Engineering, Material-Sciences