Making the internet of things possible with a new breed of ‘memristors’Easily pr
Making the internet of things possible with a new breed of ‘memristors’Easily printable, organic thin films can retain data for more than 10 years without power, work with low voltages – and become the building block of future computers that mimic the human brainThe internet of things is coming, that much we know. But still it won’t; not until we have components and chips that can handle the explosion of data that comes with IoT. In 2020, there will already be 50 billion industrial internet sensors in place all around us. A single autonomous device – a smart watch, a cleaning robot, or a driverless car – can produce gigabytes of data each day, whereas an airbus may have over 10,000 sensors in one wing alone.Two hurdles need to be overcome. First, current transistors in computer chips must be miniaturized to the size of only few nanometres; the problem is they won’t work anymore then. Second, analysing and storing unprecedented amounts of data will require equally huge amounts of energy. Sayani Majumdar, Academy Fellow at Aalto University, along with her colleagues, is designing technology to tackle both issues.Majumdar has with her colleagues designed and fabricated the basic building blocks of future components in what are called “neuromorphic” computers inspired by the human brain. It’s a field of research on which the largest ICT companies in the world and also the EU are investing heavily. Still, no one has yet come up with a nano-scale hardware architecture that could be scaled to industrial manufacture and use.Read more. -- source link
#materials science#science#electronics#transistors#thin films#organic materials#aalto university#neuromorphic computing#computing#ferroelectric