A professor at the Bourns College of Engineering has designed building blocks for memory devices with the help of telescoping carbon nanotubes something like high speed, low power microswitches. The designing would enable the use of binary or three stage switches in becoming a part of molecular scale computers.
In this design a hollow nano tube is inserted which is closed at both ends into a slightly larger one which created a telescoping motion with the aid of an electrostatic charge. A contact between nanotube and electrode leads to the creation of a conduction pathway with three possible positions.
As of now one of the problems for current non volatile memories is low speeds and the researchers were able to demonstrate the speed of these devices with the aid of simulations times of around ten to eleven seconds and data erasing time of ten to twelve seconds.
Via nanowerk
