An electron, a bit

1994/03/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Elektronika

In the laboratories of the Hitachi house in Japan, they claim that they have managed to store a bit with a single electron of information, even though electronic memories usually require 500,000.

The instrumentation that this system would use would consume a million times less energy and would need ten thousand times less space to store the information in memory.

So far only this type of seed was achieved at very low temperatures, but the Japanese system works at room temperature, they say. In addition, when the electrical current is interrupted in this system information is not lost.

Hitachi, for the moment, only reports the main materials used. They use an insulating layer of gallium arsenide with conductive silicon that is covered with crystalline silicon. It has channels from 10 to 8 meters wide.