As flexible plastic is soon to become a replacement for silicon chips, inexpensive devices are ever closer.
Now that flexible plastic alternatives to silicon chips are coming ever closer to being a reality, so is the technology news that very inexpensive smartphones, computers, and other devices and systems will become available.
A new University of Iowa research proposal has shown that it could be possible to overcome this barrier.
A research team at the University of Iowa have put together a proposal that describes a method that would allow them to get around one of the primary barriers to the development of this type of plastic device. This technology news could be immeasurably important to being able to overcome the tremendous amount of energy that is necessary for reading stored data.
This technology news has to do with the barriers that are currently in place regarding stored information.
While encoding information within light in order to make it possible to transmit it by way of fiber optics is relatively simple and inexpensive, being able to store that information in an efficient way by way of magnetism can help to ensure that it will be able to survive over time without having to use any additional energy.
According to a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) professor of physics and astronomy from the university, Michael Flatte, “a critical issue is how to convert information from one type to another.” While there is not a large amount of energy required for converting one form of energy into another within computers that use silicon chips, when it comes to flexible plastic computing device, the energy requirements are quite high. That is a make or break barrier to the ability to produce these inexpensive information processors for much cheaper computers and mobile devices in the future.
It is in this area that the researchers feel that they are making important technology news. Flatte explained that “Here, we show an efficient means of converting information encoded in magnetic storage to light in a flexible plastic device.” As was published in the Nature Communications journal, the professor and his colleagues have now been able to successfully accomplish a transfer and conversion of information between a light emitting diode and a magnet at room temperature without the need for the flow of an electrical current.
