"Green Chips" for Tomorrow's Computers

IFF-News April 19, 2010

JARA-FIT scientists achieve breakthrough in design of computer chips

An innovative concept from scientists of the Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) will pave the way for designing chips for future computers. For the generation after next of computer chips this development means higher computing power with significantly lower energy requirements - an important step for "green computing". A working group headed by Professor Rainer Waser, head of the institute "Electronic Materials" at Forschungszentrum Jülich and Chair of Electronic Materials II, RWTH Aachen University has developed a novel switching concept and the related technology for so-called memristor chips. With their research findings, the scientists are preparing for a paradigm shift in the architecture of computer chips. The article presenting these findings has been published in the internationally respected journal Nature Materials with the title "Complementary resistive switches for passive nanocrossbar memories".

Green chips
View of a CRS structure with nanometre resolution. Electrochemically produced filaments of copper atoms can be seen, which are either formed in the upper or lower part of a cell and thus represent the state "0" or "1". Due to the small dimensions of these "nanobatteries" the cells can be switched in a few nanoseconds with extremely low expenditure of energy.
Copyright:
— Image: JARA

More information:
Press release
Originalpublication in: Nature Materials
JARA-FIT

Institutes:
IFF-6 "Electronic Materials"
Electronic Materials II, RWTH Aachen University

Last Modified: 15.03.2022