• bruce965@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    […] re‑engineered flash physics by replacing silicon channels with two‑dimensional Dirac graphene and exploiting its ballistic charge transport.

    By tuning the “Gaussian length” of the channel, the team achieved two‑dimensional super‑injection, which is an effectively limitless charge surge into the storage layer that bypasses the classical injection bottleneck.

    That’s some seriously technical jargon.

    ChatGPT seems to be able to explain, not sure how accurate it is though.

    Flash memory traditionally uses silicon channels to move charges (electrons) into a storage layer. These researchers changed that by replacing silicon with Dirac graphene. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. It’s called a Dirac material because its electrons behave like massless particles, moving extremely fast and with very little resistance.

    This leads to ballistic transport: electrons move without scattering, like a bullet in a vacuum. This is far more efficient than silicon, where electrons bump into atoms and lose energy.

    Tuning the “Gaussian length" likely refers to modifying the shape or spread of the electric field or potential in the channel (possibly shaped like a Gaussian curve, i.e., a bell curve). By adjusting this, they control how charge flows.

    Achieved two-dimensional super-injection means they were able to push a large amount of charge very efficiently from the graphene channel into the memory storage layer, and in a 2D way (across the flat graphene surface), rather than through a narrow point.

    Effectively limitless charge surge: normally, in flash memory, there’s a bottleneck where only so much charge can be injected due to energy losses and scattering. But with graphene’s ballistic transport and this super-injection method, that bottleneck is gone—or drastically reduced—enabling faster and more efficient memory writing.