Super material to enhance digital memory

Researchers from University of Nebraska-Lincoln have employed Nobel Prize-winning material graphene to enhance the properties of a component primed for the next generation of high-speed, high-capacity random-access memory (RAM).

The team engineered and tested improvements in the performance of a memory structure known as a ferroelectric tunnel junction.

Ferroelectric materials naturally boast the quality of "non-volatility", meaning they maintain their polarisation - and can hence retain stored information - even in the absence of an external power source.

The team became the first to design a ferroelectric junction with electrodes made of graphene - a carbon material only one atom thick.

They placed ammonia between graphene and the ferroelectric layer.

The researchers found that their graphene-ammonia combination improved the reliability of RAM devices and allows them to read data without having to rewrite it.

"This is one of the most important differences between previous technology that has already been commercialised and this emergent ferroelectric technology," said Alexei Gruverman, a Charles Bessey Professor of physics who co-authored the study.

The findings appeared in the journal Nature Communications.