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Engineers at North Carolina State Univ. have developed a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text — far exceeding the storage capacities of today’s computer memory systems.

Using the process of selective doping — changing a material’s properties by adding an impurity — and working at the nanometer level, they added metallic nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material restricted clusters of nickel atoms less than 10 nm2 — a 90% size reduction compared with today’s techniques and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.

“Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more documents,” says Jagdish Narayan, professor of materials science and engineering and director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at NC State.

The process

plus shows promise for boosting vehicles’ fuel economy and reducing the amount of heat produced by semiconductors, a potentially vital development for more-efficient energy production. Introducing metallic properties into ceramics could enable a new generation of ceramic engines to resist temperatures twice as high as those found in normal engines and achieve fuel economy of 80 mpg. And with improved thermal conductivity, the material could have applications in harnessing alternative energy sources, such as solar energy.

that discovery additionally advances knowledge in the emerging field of spintronics, which is committed to harnessing energy produced by the spinning of electrons. Most energy used today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces. In contrast, the energy created by the spinning of electrons produces no heat. The NC State engineers were able to manipulate the nanomaterial to allow the spin of the…

Original post by dhiram