Chinese scientists say they have developed a groundbreaking material that could give storage chips an almost infinite lifespan. This new type of ferro-electric material could potentially reduce data center costs and have applications in deep-sea exploration or aerospace in the future. Ferro-electric materials are commonly used to make chips for storage and sensing purposes that are critical to artificial intelligence (AI) and other hi-tech areas hit by U.S. sanctions. In 2022, China’s leading memory chip producer, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co, was placed on the United States government trade blacklist, prohibiting it from buying U.S.-made equipment for advanced storage chip production. The move prompted China to invest heavily in technology to replace this equipment and develop new parts, and it has since achieved mass production of storage chips, breaking the monopoly held by foreign manufacturers in the industry. As a result, the price of storage chips has fallen dramatically in the past year, in some cases by up to 90%. These storage chips are used for computer memory, automotive chip memory, solid-state drives, USB drives and smartphone flash memory.
Ferro-electric materials are among the most ideal for making storage chips due to their low power consumption, lossless reading and fast writing capabilities. Ferro-electricity allows these materials to rapidly switch states under an electric field – a process known as polarization – which remains stable even after the field is removed. It can be likened to a form of permanent rapid memory. These materials are already used in storage technology, sensors and energy devices, and they could be used to build storage servers or to support large data centers in the future – potentially having an impact on the U.S.-China rivalry over AI technologies. But traditional ferro-electric materials that are widely used commercially – like lead zirconate titanate (PZT) – can experience what is known as ferro-electric fatigue during use, leading to performance degradation and eventual failure. The Chinese team set out to tackle this problem by improving the structure of the material.
The research was led by Professor Zhong Zhicheng from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Professors Liu Fucai from the University of Electronic Science and Technology in Chengdu, Sichuan, and Li Wenwu from Fudan University in Shanghai. Their findings appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Science on June 7. The team came up with a nanometer-thick two-dimensional layered material that they called 3R-MoS2, which exhibited zero performance degradation after millions of cycles, suggesting that storage devices made from this new material have no read/write limitations, the South China Morning Post reports.
