Creating a memory device out of paper
November 26, 2008 By Miranda Marquit(PhysOrg.com) -- As technology continues to shrink, and as memory needs become more demanding, the industry dealing with microelectronics requires devices that are cost-efficient and lightweight. And, while organic materials have shown some promise, they still lack some of the essential qualities needed for application in a wide variety of fields. “The longest time that has lasted from organic memories,” Rodrigo Martins tells PhysOrg.com, “is about 5,000 seconds. This just doesn’t allow for practical use in many cases as a memory device.”
Martins, a scientist at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal, continues: “What we have shown is that it is possible to store information on paper, electronically, for more than a year and a half.” Martins is part of a team that includes Pedro Barquinha, Luís Pereira, Nuno Carreia, Gonçalo Gonçalves, Isabel Ferreira and Elvira Fortunato. The group has demonstrated memory performance using a field-effect transistor built on paper. Their work is published in Applied Physics Letters: “Write-erase and read paper memory transistor.”
“What we are doing is exploiting the memory effect,” Martins explains. “We have a sort of type of integrated foam composed of fibers set up that increases the capability of storing carriers – or charges – in our paper.” These charges allow the paper to display information that is also erasable – and the paper is rewritable so that additional information can be added.
One of the attractive features of this memory paper is that it is produced at room temperature, meaning that it does not need special conditions for its manufacture. To create the paper, long fibers from pine and polyester were mixed together and put into an ionic resin matrix. The fibers were then coated with gallium indium zinc oxide, using magnetron sputtering. “We have integrated discrete fibers, and contacts are applied on the extremes of the channel region to allow the induced carriers to move,” Martins says. “Electrons move along the fibers.”
Martins points out that another of the attractive features of this paper is its ability to hold multiple layers of information. “If I want my paper to catch information,” he explains, “I can apply a signal of, say, five volts. And it writes on the paper. If I want to erase the information, I basically apply minus five volts – the opposite. But, at the same time, I can write another layer of information using 10 volts. The paper can distinguish between the two, and even if I erase the five volt information, the 10 volt information remains.”
The main applications that Martins sees for this work right now involve product information for merchandise. “You can have multiple layers of information on a product label,” he says. “Instead of just the expiring date, you can have more than this, including information about when it went on the shelves.” However, Martins also sees the potential for this paper’s use in books. “You can create a display, bringing a new dimension to the paper,” he says. “You push a button and it changes. You can see a static or dynamic picture, or even another page.”
“Such technology,” he cautions, “is still some years away. It will take five or six years to really work out how to use this technology to such an effect. But we do know that paper can store a great deal of information. We have the paper transistor; we have the memory. We have everything we need to make this happen.”
More Information: Rodrigo Martins, Pedro Barquinha, Luís Pereira, Nuno Correia, Gonçalo Gonçalves, Isabel Ferreira, and Elvira Fortunato. “Write-erase and read paper memory transistor,” Applied Physics Letters (2008). Available online: http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/93/203501/1 .
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Nov 05, 2009 |
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what does 'The longest time that has lasted from organic memories' mean?
my organic memories last for years.
There are very compelling reasons - and risks - to going paperless that also apply to electronic paper, such as reduction of bulk and risk of losing data. Paper is easily damaged: compare that to the many stories of removable media that survived catastrophes. Paper that remains undamaged can store data nearly indefinitely (using ordinary writing) - witness the Dead Sea scrolls: compare that to memory sticks that have definite and known cycle limits, and CD/DVD media that breaks down over time and becomes unreadable. (I cycle all of my data to new media on a regular basis and keep it in at least two formats at all times because of this.)
So...cool, but probably not a better solution than what else is out there.
Your "organic" memories are dynamic. Like those of DRAM, they are periodically refreshed; those that are not simply fade away.
The device here discussed is static memory; like SRAM, it survives a loss of power & requires no refresh.
I sell corn and peas. Now I can buy one label for all of my cans and load the information. No more ink. I can alter my labels remotely.
I own a store. I can talk to my cans of corn. My cans of corn talk back. My inventory is A and product recalls are no sweat.
I'm corn. I don't know or care what is going on.
Well, you get the idea.
I invent this kind of stuff. I get excited thinking about all of the cool stuff I can do with it and I know it will be done. I wonder if other people do.
This is like cavemen needing six more years to 'making stones easier to carve', while in the mean time everyone is using papyrus.
Image a cell phone with a bar-code scanner in which anyone can scan a product's label, which contains of course an internet link where one can download right then and there, the entire history of corn if they want.
It will be hard to even find a niche market for this tech in a hand-held computer age, but i've been wrong once before.
This kinda confused me. I don't get what makes it so much more amazing than your average memory chip. I mean sure, it's versatile and has more blatantly practical uses (you can't make a shopping list on a memory chip!) (well, I guess you could, but... you get what I'm saying.) and maybe even biodegradable, but it sounds like it won't catch on.