What just happened? Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have unveiled a flash memory device that breaks speed records once thought unreachable. Dubbed “PoX,” the device can program data in just 400 picoseconds, or four hundred trillionths of a second, making it the fastest semiconductor charge storage device ever recorded.

To put this achievement into perspective, PoX can perform 25 billion operations per second – surpassing the previous world record for similar technology by a factor of 100,000.

The implications are profound, particularly for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence. As AI models continue to grow in complexity and scale, their soaring computational demands are pushing existing memory technologies to their limits. Traditional volatile memories like static RAM and dynamic RAM offer impressive speeds – typically writing data in under a nanosecond – but they lose all stored information when power is cut.

The researchers developed PoX using graphene, a material renowned for its exceptional electrical properties.

Non-volatile memories like flash storage retain data without power and consume significantly less energy than volatile counterparts, but they’ve traditionally lagged in speed – often requiring microseconds to milliseconds for data access.

A research team at Fudan University, led by Professor Zhou Peng of the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems, set out to close this performance gap by rethinking the physical structure of flash memory. Rather than using conventional silicon, the researchers turned to graphene – a two-dimensional material celebrated for its remarkable electrical properties – and implemented a Dirac band structure.

By leveraging graphene’s ballistic transport behavior and precisely tuning the Gaussian length of the memory channel, they developed a mechanism they call “super-injection.” This process enables an almost unrestricted flow of charge into the storage layer, effectively eliminating the speed bottleneck that has limited non-volatile memory for decades.

According to Zhou Peng, the difference is staggering. “This is like the device working 1 billion times in the blink of an eye, while a typical USB flash drive can only work 1,000 times. The previous world record for similar technology was 2 million.”

The potential applications for PoX reach well beyond faster consumer electronics. In the realm of artificial intelligence, the speed at which data can be accessed and processed is a key limiter of overall computing performance. As AI models become increasingly data-intensive, storage systems capable of keeping pace with processors are critical. With its unprecedented speed and low power consumption, PoX could enable real-time processing of massive datasets while also curbing the energy demands of data movement, one of the major inefficiencies in today’s AI hardware.