Scientists Identify Compound With Memory That Can Boost Computing

It isn't alive and has no structures even approaching the complexity of the brain, but a compound called vanadium dioxide is capable of 'remembering' previous external stimuli, researchers have found, Michelle4 Starr reported for SciTechDaily.

Photo Insert: Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is a material that has recently been floated as an alternative, or complement, to silicon as a basis for electronic devices, due to its potential to outperform the latter material as a semiconductor.

This is the first time this ability has been identified in a material; but it may not be the last. The discovery has some pretty intriguing implications for the development of electronic devices, in particular data processing and storage.

"Here we report electronically accessible long-lived structural states in vanadium dioxide that can provide a scheme for data storage and processing," wrote a team of researchers led by electrical engineer Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in their paper.

The research has been published in Nature Electronics.

"These glass-like functional devices could outperform conventional metal-oxide-semiconductor electronics in terms of speed, energy consumption, and miniaturization, as well as provide a route to neuromorphic computation and multilevel memories."

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is a material that has recently been floated as an alternative, or complement, to silicon as a basis for electronic devices, due to its potential to outperform the latter material as a semiconductor.

One of the most intriguing properties of VO2 is that, below 68 degrees Celsius (154.4 degrees Fahrenheit), it behaves as an insulator – but above that critical temperature, it abruptly switches to metal, with good conductivity, a change known as the metal-insulator transition. It was only recently, in 2018, that scientists discovered why: As temperature rises, the way the atoms arrange themselves in their lattice pattern changes.

When the temperature drops back down, the material reverts to its original insulator state.

Samizadeh Nikoo originally set out to investigate how long VO2 takes to transition from insulator to metal, and vice versa, taking measurements as he triggered the switch. It was these measurements that revealed something very peculiar. Although it returned to the same starting state, the VO2 behaved as if it remembered recent activity.

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