EL PERIÓDICO and the Barcelona Materials Science Institute (ICMAB, CSIC) will publish a series of videos and articles every Wednesday until September 7 within the framework of the popular science project ‘YouMaker: this is how science is done’. This is content in which various experts will explain in a didactic way the processes for preparing materials used in the fields of energy, electronics and medicine, such as batteries or solar cells, from their laboratories and with the participation of professional science communicators.
One of the main challenges of today’s electronics is the high energy consumption involved in data storage and processing. Do you know how much energy we spend on saving data? In saving information in memories such as hard drives, flash memories, or in the cloud? In 2015, the energy consumption in data storage centers on the planet was greater than the energy consumed by the entire United Kingdom. If we could store information and process data like our brains, it would be much more efficient! Other challenges, no less important, are the cost and abundance of raw materials, and the integration of more and more components into smaller and smaller devices. In this sense, silicon, although it has worked very well so far, is getting to the smallest possible size, and therefore it will be more and more difficult to make devices that have more functions and are smaller in size.
For this reason, a team from the ICMAB, including the researcher Ignasi Fina from the Multifunctional Materials and Complex Structures group, is working on the search for new functional materials, other than silicon, to make more efficient memories. The technique they use to make these materials is known as pulsed laser deposition (PLD). With the help of a highly energetic vacuum laser, atoms are detached from a ceramic substance, which are then deposited on a surface. Little by little, a very fine crystalline layer of atoms is formed, a layer with a thickness on the nanometric scale, and which has a very high crystallinity. The material obtained is of very small dimensions and with hardly any defects, which is essential to use it as memories to store information. These materials are called ferroelectric materials, materials that can store information in the surface charge, which they generate spontaneously. That is why they are much more efficient than the memories that are currently used.
imitate the human brain
These materials could also be used, in the not too distant future, for neuromorphic computing, that is, to imitate the human brain and its ability to process information. The brain is the most efficient machine that exists in data processing, from the energetic point of view. That’s why we want to look as much like him as possible. The new ICMAB materials could do it.
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In this video, science communicator Anna Morales and ICMAB researcher Ignasi Fina explain “How are ferroelectric memories made?” within the framework of the project “YouMaker: this is how science is done”. We will discover how this technique works to make crystalline layers of materials and why the memories being made at ICMAB could be used.
YouMaker is a project of the Barcelona Institute of Materials Science (ICMAB, CSIC) in collaboration with the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) of the Ministry of Science and Innovation.