Modern SSDs are an engineering marvel. Despite being housed next to the huge hot-burping graphics card of the gaming Pc, they are very fast and very reliable. However, as with all silicon-based chips, there is a limit to the temperature at which they can run before they lose data or fail completely. However, 2 teams of researchers have developed a type of flash memory that can hold data at temperatures that make Venus' afternoons look cooler compared.

Details of the study were published in the Nature journal (Via Interesting Engineering), but the University of Pennsylvania successfully summarized the findings for people without a PhD-level material science background. 2 research teams from the Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, led by Deep Jariwala and Roy Olsson, devoted months of work to finding the perfect thickness of ferroelectric aluminum nitride (AlScN) to use as a substrate for flash memory devices.

Everyday flash memory, such as USB drives, SD cards, and SSDs, of course, uses silicon, which has been pushed to levels unthinkable just 10 years ago. The best gaming SSDs hold multiple terabytes of data and can transfer thousands of megabytes in 1 second. They also last for years to write endurance levels in the petabyte region.

However, they have 1 significant failure — they are not very good at dealing with high temperatures. Above a certain temperature, silicon-based flash cells struggle to hold data, and even the best of them (used in the space industry, for example) fail at 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit).

So when Jariwala and Olsson's team used AlScN to create a flash memory that can withstand up to 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), they had something special in their hands, and the thickness of the AlScN layer had to be just the right one, so it's not easy to get it right. I had no idea what was going on.

"If it is too thin, increased activity can promote diffusion and degrade the material. If it's too thick, there's the ferroelectric switching we were looking for...[s]o, my lab and Roy Olsson's lab worked together for many months to find the thickness of this Goldilocks

He also stated that "the crystal structure of AlScN also gives a more stable and strong bond between atoms, which is not only heat-resistant but also quite durable", making it ideal for use in extreme environments, not just those on the toast side. It is also ideal for use in a wide range of applications.

The obvious use of this type of material is for spacecraft landing on planets such as Venus, whose average surface temperature is 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit). You might think that this degree of heat will fry the flash memory cells as well as the silicon chips, and you'll be right.

In such cases, silicon carbide is used as a semiconductor material, Pradhan explains."It's not close to the processing power of a silicon processor, so you can't really do advanced processing such as AI or processing large amounts of data in high temperatures or harsh environments.

The toughness of this new material means that the memory is better integrated into the silicon carbide chip, which helps to improve performance.

However, there is no immediate application of this technology for gaming PCs, but research could lead to the development of volatile and nonvolatile memory chips that are even more heat resistant than current ones. This improves data retention in systems that generate large amounts of heat and eliminates the need to use the high-capacity, expensive heatsinks required for the latest PCIe5.0Ssd.