Buckyballs store 1s and 0s in new memory device
From Boston, at a meeting of the Materials Research Society
In pursuit of faster and denser memory chips that might one day enable computers to boot instantly, scientists have created a material that stores bits of data in the soccer ball–shaped carbon molecules known as buckyballs.
Research groups around the world have made great strides in devising molecule-based electronic devices. But organizing such devices in vast numbers has proved difficult. Alternatively, some scientists have focused on making chips out of polymers and other organic materials, a much easier task. However, “organic electronics tend to be slow,” says Alokik Kanwal of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.