Taiwanese researchers have been able to print computer memory onto paper.
Credit: CITEWorld
CITEWorld reported on the research by Dr. Der-Hsien Lien and his team, who demonstrated printing “the kind of memory computers read” onto paper, with the aim that with printable transistors, this could “spawn a host of easy-to-make connected paper-based products” such as “do-it-yourself RFID tags”.
Noting that “there’s something deliciously ironic about printing memory onto paper [as] paper has held memories for thousands of years”, the site adds that this development can jump on the back of 3D printing to offer “home-printable objects” that can talk to “each other with home-printable computer components”.
With paper being “cheap, flexible and widespread”, it is a “good candidate as a substrate”, with the issue of absorption and “being porous and uneven” previously an “unwanted quality” when constructing electronics. Dr. Lien and his team coated paper in carbon to “make a type of resistive random access memory” that would apply voltage across the insulator layer with an electrode, so that each “bit” on the paper would be an insulator sandwiched between two electrodes.
The insulator in this case was “the right kind of ink”, which was titanium oxide printed with a modified inkjet printer, and a silver solution was used to print 50 µm dots as the electrodes. This meant that one A4 piece of paper would hold one megabyte of memory, with Lien adding that the memory “maintains its state for about eight minutes” after power is switched off, and holds up “if you bend and fold the paper”.
With much more research to be done, Lien adds that “in the future you [could] make a functional device in your home”, with initial uses including shopkeepers printing “labels for goods with an embedded list of all the goods in certain boxes”, and whilst read and write speeds are “not fast enough for complicated tasks yet”, the technology is “suitable enough for low level jobs”.