One of the key elements in AI development is the storage of information. Storing the information requires a great deal of energy as the American population is starting to realize with the massive effort to set up AI centers and adjacent energy production in almost all parts of the country. To store a single bit of information requires an energy equivalent of roughly 200,000 electrons. This will generally assure that the ubiquitous “1” or “0” of data storage does not fade into noise.
Researchers at Fudan University have reduced that number to one,using a flash memory that reads a solitary electron at room temperature. Earlier experiments in microelectronics which attempted to store data at the single electron level resulted in only tens of millivolts which soon faded into noise. The researchers at Fudan have developed a device, which they have named Guiyi or “return to one,” that lifts the signal from just tens of millivolts to 0.5 volts, improving the storage tenfold.
