This Memory Chip Survives Temperatures Hotter Than Lava

A standout moment from last week’s Artemis 2 mission involved a seemingly “missing” part of the Orion capsule’s heat shield. While NASA clarified that nothing unusual happened, it is a reminder that during missions in extreme environments, heat management is important. Even without astronauts, the high temperatures and pressures inside spacecraft can wreak havoc on vital components – especially memory chips that hold valuable data about worlds beyond Earth.

A new memory chip prototype, described in a recent Science paper, may offer a practical solution to this issue. According to the research team, the chip blueprint is a small sandwich of extreme materials that works reliably even at temperatures of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (about 700 degrees Celsius) — and can probably even operate beyond these temperatures, as this number only represents the maximum provided by the test equipment.

“You could call it a revolution,” Joshua Yang, senior author of the study and an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, said in a statement. “This is the best high-temperature memory ever demonstrated.”

the chip that could

The chip is called a memristor or an electrical device that stores information and performs computing operations. The component is a small “sandwich” of three layers: tungsten on top, hafnium oxide ceramic in the middle, and graphene on the bottom. Specifically, tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, 6,192 °F (3,422 °C), while graphene is just a flat sheet of carbon one atom thick.

The team reported that these unique physical properties enabled the creation of the novel chip, which ran at just 1.5 volts to process data for more than 50 hours at 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. In that time, the chip operated through more than a billion switching cycles without requiring any external modification.

The reason conventional chips short-circuit under high temperatures is that the heat forces the topmost layer of the “sandwich” to stick to the bottom layer. However, the surface chemistry of graphene and tungsten is almost like oil and water, Yang explained. In short, it is physically It is difficult for the device to short-circuit.

In follow-up investigations, the team confirmed that this indeed happened through electron microscopy and spectroscopy, allowing researchers to see at the atomic-level how the different layers interact.

Memory chips on Venus and elsewhere

Yang cautioned that there is still a long way to go before these robust chips appear in practical applications. For example, a “complete computer” requires the logic circuits and other electronic components that allow memory chips to work as intended, he explained in the statement.

Furthermore, the current prototype, as impressive as it is, was handmade inside a lab – with no attention paid to how the technology could be scaled up. But the team is hopeful, because individual materials are not very rare in the semiconductor industry.

In any case, having the blueprint paves the way for applications in different places. In particular, this chip would likely survive the extreme temperatures of Venus, which have more or less killed every spacecraft that has dared to breach its atmosphere. In addition, the researchers said the chip could be useful in deep-earth drilling projects or nuclear and fusion energy systems.