New plastic technology holds key to cheaper storage

By Stuart Finlayson

Engineers at Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard have invented a combination of materials that could lead to cheap and super-compact electronic memory devices for archiving digital images or other data, providing an alternative to more costly silicon chips.

The invention could result in a single-use memory card that permanently stores data and is faster and easier to use than a compact disk. The device could be very small because it would not involve moving parts such as the laser and motor drive required by CDs.

The researchers achieved the result by discovering a previously unrecognised property of a commonly used conductive polymer plastic coating. Their memory device combines this polymer, which is inexpensive and easy to produce, with very thin-film, silicon-based electronics.

"We are hybridising," said Princeton professor of electrical engineering Stephen Forrest, who led the research group. "We are making a device that is organic (the plastic polymer) and inorganic (the thin-film silicon) at the same time."

As a result, the device would be like a CD in that writing data onto it makes permanent physical changes in the plastic and can be done only once. But it also would be like a conventional electronic memory chip because it would plug directly into an electronic circuit and would have no moving parts. “The device could probably be made cheaply enough that one-time use would be the best way to go,” Forrest said.

Warren Jackson, scientist at HP labs and co-author of a research paper on the technology, said the fact that the technology can only be written on once is beneficial in many applications, rather than a hindrance.

"With music or photographs, it's actually an advantage to have something you can't rewrite," he said, adding that in professional fields such as accounting, it would be useful to have a trail of files that can't be erased.

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