Scaling energy barriers to save data

Without magnetic disks to help them out, computers can’t remember much. That’s because

nearly all electronic memory in computers goes blank when the power goes off.

Kai Shum of the City University of New York (CUNY) and his colleagues have developed a

new approach to avoid computer amnesia. To create so-called nonvolatile electronic memory,

the researchers built one-bit, prototype memory cells from layers of metal and semiconductors,

manipulating the energy barriers that appear naturally at the interfaces.