A Rice University laboratory pioneering memory devices that use cheap, plentiful silicon oxide to store data has pushed them a step further with chips that show the technology's practicality.

he team led by Rice chemist James Tour has built a 1-kilobit rewritable silicon oxide device with diodes that eliminate data-corrupting crosstalk.

A paper on the new work appears this week in the journal Advanced Materials.

With gigabytes of flash memory becoming steadily cheaper, a 1k nonvolatile memory unit has little practical use. But as a proof of concept, the chip shows it should be possible to surpass the limitations of flash memory in packing density, energy consumption per bit and switching speed.

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