Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have created a memory circuit, built by a joint Caltech-UCLA team, the size of a white blood cell with a 160 kilobit capacity. Caltech researchers say the 160,000 memory bits in the circuit consist of 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires, with a layer of molecular switches crammed in between. Each wire crossing represents a single 15-nanometer-wide bit. This is reportedly the densest memory circuit ever fabricated - memory devices currently on the market are about 140 nanometers wide.
"It"s the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year 2020. But at the moment, it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions. Whether it"s actually possible to get this new memory circuit into a laptop, I don"t know. But we have time," said James Heath, a Caltech chemistry professor who led the research team.