In the beginning, it was down to a bunch of backyard grease monkeys, factory owners and manufacturing magnates to kit-bash, jury-rig and cobble together the first motorized two-wheelers. Although few of them stayed in the game, their legends live on in the steel and chrome of today’s hogs, choppers and scoots. How well do you remember the now-defunct greats?
For some time now, conventional computer memory has been heading toward a crunch—a physical limit of how much storage can be crammed into a space before it is overwhelmed by heat and power problems. Generally, researchers have tried to avert this heat death in two ways: leapfrogging to the next generation of memory or refining current memory.
Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) have combined the two approaches to create new memory that amps up performance while remaining compatible with today’s devices. CANi also used nanoionics (a technique for moving tiny bits of matter around on a chip) to overcome the limitations of conventional electronics: Instead of moving electrons among ions, nanoionics moves the ions themselves.