It isn't alive and has no structures that are close to the complexity of the brain, but a compound called vanadium dioxide is able to remember past stimuli.
It is the first time that this ability has been found in a material. There are some intriguing implications for the development of electronic devices as a result of the discovery.
"Here we report electronically accessible long-lived structural states in vanadium dioxide that can provide a scheme for data storage and processing," wrote a team of researchers led by electrical engineer Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo of cole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
These glass-like functional devices could perform better than metal-oxide-semiconductor electronics in terms of speed, energy consumption and miniaturization.
Vanadium dioxide (VO 2 ) is a material that has recently been floated as an alternative, or complement, to Silicon as a basis for electronic devices, due to its potential to surpass Silicon as a Semiconductor.
VO 2 behaves as an insulator, but above a critical temperature, it abruptly switches to a metal, which is known as the metal-insulator transition.
The way the atoms arrange themselves in their lattice pattern changes with temperature.
The material returns to its original state when the temperature goes back up. When he triggered the switch, he wanted to investigate how long VO 2 takes to transition from insulator to metal.
Something very strange was revealed by the measurement. The VO 2 seemed to remember recent activity even though it returned to the same starting state.
The path from one side to the other was taken in the experiment. The VO 2 changed its state due to the current's heat. The atomic structure relaxed when the current was gone.
Things became interesting when the current was reapplied.
Elison Matioli says that the VO 2 seemed to remember the first phase transition. It has nothing to do with electronic states but with the physical structure of the material. No other material behaves in this way.
VO 2 kept some kind of information on the most recent applied current for at least three hours. "But we don't currently have the instruments needed to measure that."
The switch is related to the behavior of brain cells that serve as a unit of memory and processor. Computing based on a similar system could have an advantage over classical chips and circuits.
The dual property of the material makes VO 2 tick all the right boxes for memory devices. Its properties give it an advantage over memory devices that use electrical states to store data.
"We have reported glass-like dynamics in VO 2 that can be excited in sub-nanosecond timescales and monitored for several orders of magnitudes in time," the researchers wrote.
The functional devices can potentially meet the constant demands of electronics in terms of downscaling, fast operation and decreasing the voltage-supply level.
The research was published in a journal.
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