Chinese team says new storage chip material has a near-infinite lifespan

Ferroelectric material has potential to reduce data centre costs and could have applications in deep-sea exploration or aerospace.

Reading Time:3 minutes

Ferroelectric materials are used to make chips for storage and sensing purposes that are critical to AI and other hi-tech areas where a tech war is playing out between China and the US. Photo: Shutterstock Images

Published: 10:00pm, 14 Jun 2024Updated: 11:56pm, 14 Jun 2024

Chinese scientists say they have developed a groundbreaking material that could give storage chips an almost infinite lifespan.

This new type of ferroelectric material could potentially reduce data centre costs and have applications in deep-sea exploration or aerospace in the future.

Ferroelectric materials are commonly used to make chips for storage and sensing purposes that are critical to artificial intelligence and other hi-tech areas hit by US sanctions, as a tech war plays out between the United States and China.

In 2022, China’s leading memory chip producer, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co, was placed on the United States government trade blacklist, prohibiting it from buying US-made equipment for advanced storage chip production.

The move prompted China to invest heavily in technology to replace this equipment and develop new parts, and it has since achieved mass production of storage chips, breaking the monopoly held by foreign manufacturers in the industry.

As a result, the price of storage chips has fallen dramatically in the past year, in some cases by up to 90 per cent. These storage chips are used for computer memory, automotive chip memory, solid-state drives, USB drives and smartphone flash memory.