One standout moment from last week’s Artemis 2 mission involved a seemingly “missing” chunk of the Orion capsule’s heat shield. While NASA clarified that nothing abnormal happened, it’s a reminder that during missions to extreme environments, heat management is crucial. Even without astronauts, high temperatures and pressures inside spacecraft can wreak havoc on critical components—especially the memory chips that hold valuable data about the world beyond Earth.
A new memory chip prototype, described in a recent Science paper, may offer a practical solution to this issue. According to the research team, the chip blueprint is a tiny sandwich of extreme materials that works reliably even at temperatures of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (about 700 degrees Celsius)—and probably could function beyond these temperatures, as that number merely represents the maximum provided by the testing equipment.
“You may call it a revolution,” Joshua Yang, the study’s senior author and an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, said in a statement. “It is the best high-temperature memory ever demonstrated.”
The chip that could
The chip is what’s called a memristor, or an electrical device that both stores information and performs computing operations. The component is a tiny “sandwich” of three layers: tungsten on the top, hafnium oxide ceramic in the middle, and graphene on the bottom. Notably, tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal at 6,192 degrees Fahrenheit (3,422 degrees Celsius), whereas graphene is a flat sheet of carbon just one atom thick.
These unique physical properties enabled the creation of the novel chip, which ran on a measly 1.5 volts to process data for over 50 hours at 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, the team explained. In that time, the chip powered through more than one billion switching cycles without needing any external modifications.
The reason conventional chips short-circuit under high temperatures is because heat forces the uppermost layer of the “sandwich” to stick to the bottom layer. However, graphene’s and tungsten’s surface chemistry is almost like oil and water, Yang explained. In short, it is physically difficult for the device to short-circuit.
In follow-up investigations, the team confirmed this indeed happened via electron microscopy and spectroscopy, which gave the researchers an atomic-level look at how the different layers interacted.
Memory chips on Venus, and elsewhere
Yang cautioned that there’s still a long way to go before these sturdy chips could appear in practical applications. For instance, a “complete computer” requires logic circuits and other electronic components that allow the memory chip to work as intended, he explained in the statement.
What’s more, the current prototype, as impressive as it is, was handmade inside a lab—not (yet) taking into consideration how the technology could be scaled up. But the team is hopeful, as the individual materials aren’t too rare in the semiconductor industry.
In any case, having the blueprint paves the road for applications in a variety of places. Notably, this chip would likely survive the extreme temperatures of Venus, which has more or less killed every spacecraft that dared infringe upon its atmosphere. In addition, the chip could be useful in deep-earth drilling projects or nuclear and fusion energy systems, the researchers added.
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