Arizona State University is making some great advances in the field of nanotechnology electronic storage. Their new technique is called programmable metallization cell (PMC). It is apparently one tenth cheaper than equivalently sized flash drives and a whopping 10,000 times more energy efficient. Put together, this means you can have tremendously small storage capacities in tiny packages which use equally tiny amounts of energy.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

In research published in October’s IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Kozicki and his collaborators from the Jülich Research Center in Germany describe how the PMC builds an on-demand copper bridge between two electrodes. When the technology writes a binary 1, it creates a nanowire bridge between two electrodes. When no wire is present, that state is stored as a 0.

The first thing that came to my mind while reading this was potential neural applications. Imagine taking this tiny storage unit and coupling it with a paper thin battery. Throw in a “Utah” electrode arrays and you have a portable brain imaging implant that can hold hours, days, weeks worth of information. This could be excellent for research in a number of areas, from behavior studies to epilepsy treatment.

The article describes how a terrabyte of information could be stored on a thumbdrive. Imagine how much could be stored on the size of a pin, or a sliver of paper. More than enough for an implant. A mouse could receive one of these paper thin implants and perform some behavioral test (such as running a maze).

Researchers would have an exact readout of the brain areas selected coresponding to time. Include a transmitter in the implant to get data back off the device and you have a mouse that can perform any number of tests and provide excellent data without the need for bulky or interfering equipment.

Hat tip Foresight Nanotech Instititute.