Protein a good source for chips
28 Mar 2008 | 11:40 GMT
Japanese ferritin about
HOORAY for the Japanese, they’ve solved the age old chip/protein conundrum.
Matsushita said it has developed a chip-making technology which uses protein to make high-performance memory chips.
The development was the work of boffins at Matsushita, Tohoku University, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Osaka University. And others – well, you know what it’s like when you have chips. People materialize from all over the place.
Their research results will be announced today at the Japanese Society of Applied Physics in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture. So get your coat on and get over there.
You too can make memory out of protein. Here’s how.
Take some ferritin - you know, the hollow, spherical-shaped protein with a diameter of about 12 nanometers. Mix ferritin with a liquid solution of metals, and allow metal particles to seep into the ferritin’s cavities.
Give it a bit of time. Maybe you could tidy up the kitchen in the meantime.
Next, you filter the solution to remove alkali metals, as they cause
malfunctions in semiconductor chips. Then drip liquid onto a silicon substrate
(available from the usual sources). You’ll find the Ferritin lines up on the
substrate in an orderly fashion – in the trade we call this self-organization –
along a pattern created using an organic membrane.
Now you’ll want to wash and dry the silicon substrate with the liquid. Then pop it in an oven and heat up to 500 C. This removes the protein and leaves just metal particles on the substrate. Feed some electricity in and the resulting substrate should display the electrical characteristics necessary for a memory element.
By using ultrafine processing at several nanometer levels, the technology could make it possible to develop a stamp-size memory chip with a 1-terabyte data capacity, according to Nikkei.
The developers hope to create a commercially-available technology in five ye ars. So in five years we may get cheap memory chips that have 30 times the data capacity of today’s cutting edge technology.
Salt and vinegar? µ
L'Inq
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