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China’s new chip stores data with a single electron, breaking AI memory bottleneck
The technology enables AI chat models to run on phones using minimal power, without ‘losing memory’ during conversations
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How many electrons does it take to store a single bit of information?
For today’s most advanced dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips from Samsung and SK Hynix, the answer is roughly 200,000.
That is the price of reliability – a vast reservoir of charge needed to ensure a “1” or “0” does not fade into noise.
But a team at Fudan University in Shanghai has just collapsed that number to its theoretical floor: one.
In a paper published in Science on July 16, microelectronics professor Zhou Peng and his colleagues detailed a working two-dimensional (2D) flash memory that traps and reads a solitary electron at room temperature – a feat long regarded as the holy grail for semiconductors.
The device, which they named Guiyi, lifts a faint, fleeting signal from just tens of millivolts to a robust 0.5 volts, a tenfold improvement over any previous single-electron attempt.
For the general public, the most direct impact of this technology is that it makes it possible to run large language models on mobile phones using minimal power, without the artificial intelligence (AI) “losing its memory” during conversations.
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