A film a few atoms thick that refuses to switch off: a step toward computer chips that sip power

Some materials could store information with a tiny nudge of voltage instead of a steady flow of current — if only they kept working when sliced thin enough for a modern chip. A team at Brown University, led by engineer Lucas Caretta, has now cleared that hurdle with bismuth ferrite, a material whose electric and magnetic states are linked, so data could be written electrically and read back magnetically. Made very thin, such films usually develop a 'dead layer' and lose exactly those useful properties. The Brown team grew the film squeezed tight on a crystal base and added a metal layer that screens out stray electric fields — and the material stayed electric and magnetic down to just a few atoms thick, even gaining a bonus form of magnetism that is fast, packs densely and still gives a strong signal. Published in Nature Materials, it is a material, not a finished chip — but it removes a roadblock on the way to faster, denser computer memory and logic that use dramatically less energy, at a moment when AI is pushing computing's power bills ever higher.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation