According to the Korea Herald, the Korea Ministry of Technology and Information announced on Thursday local time that a research team in the country has discovered a way to increase the storage capacity of memory chips by a factor of 1,000, while increasing the use of 0.5 nanometer process technology. Possibility.
The professor of energy and chemical engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) Li Junxi and his team have published this discovery in the international academic journal "Science", which has caused peers and semiconductor industry attention.
The UNIST team is funded by the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation. The team’s latest discovery will enable chip makers to use a new physical phenomenon to make smaller chips, or expand data storage capacity by a factor of 1,000.
According to reports, the research of the UNIST team led by Professor Li Junxi has discovered a method that can control a single atom in semiconductor materials, and further increase the storage capacity of microchips and break the size limit of the chip domain. (Note: Domain refers to a group of thousands of atoms moving together to store data in the form of binary numbers or signals. Due to the characteristics of this field, it is difficult to maintain the storage capacity while changing the manufacturing technology of memory chips from the current 10nm level is further reduced.)
The UNIST team found that by adding a drop of charge to a semiconductor material called ferroelectric hafnium oxide (or HfO2), four separate atoms can be controlled to store 1 bit of data. . This means that if it is reasonable, a flash memory module can store 500 TB of data per square centimeter, which is 1,000 times the current flash memory chip.