Speaking at the American Chemical Society, James Tour of Rice University has apparently demonstrated non-volatile 3D memory chips that are transparent, flexible enough to be folded like paper, and capable of withstanding temperatures up to 1,000F (537C). According to Tour, devices based on his 3D memory could survive an accidental trip to the tumble dryer, or “even a voyage to Mars.”

Furthermore, and perhaps most excitingly, this 3D memory is fashioned from silicon oxide, an age-old, cheap, and very-well-understood darling of the semiconductor industry that can easily be manipulated using existing CMOS processes.

While the American Chemical Society press release is infuriatingly short on details, PubMed actually has the (paywalled) research paper in question. In short, it seems like applying voltage to the (non-conductive dielectric) silicon oxide creates conductive channels of silicon nanocrystals — a conductive pathway that persists until a different voltage is applied. The silicon oxide needs to be fashioned into a thin channel (pictured below), but apart from that Tour’s resistive switch seems very simple. α-C, in case you’re wondering, is a thin layer of carbon that acts as the electrodes.

If this sounds a lot like the memristors being developed by HP, you’d be right. Like memristors, Tour’s new silicon oxide memory is capable of very fast switching (sub-100ns) and has a high switching threshold. Because the device is so simple (it’s really just a thin layer of silicon oxide with two terminals — no metal at all!), and the silicon nanocrystal pathway is so small (on the scale of 5nm), Tour seems hopeful that his memory can be scaled to very high densities. Like memristors, there’s also the possibility that conventional logic can be built from these silicon nanocrystal gates, though little research has been done in that area yet.

Moving forward, Tour says that the technology is patented and that he’s talking to OEMs in the hope of getting his 3D memory into products. It isn’t clear why the new memory is transparent (or whether it’s transparent at high densities), but if this is really the case then it would be killer to embed memory in displays and touchscreen assemblies, or combined with OLED tech and transparent lithium-ion batteries this could be the basis of a semi-transparent, flexible e-book reader or similar. Moving memory into the display could result in thinner smartphones and tablets, too. Being amenable to 3D stacking is obviously a boon, but to be honest, Samsung, Micron, and co are already working on 3D DRAM and flash.

Personally, I would remain a little dubious about Tour’s new memory until we actually see a photo of it in practice. It seems odd to make claims of transparency and flexibility, and then fail to provide the proof.

Updated: Rice University has furnished us with a photo! If you look closely, you can see some faint structures. There’s no word on the density of the memory, however. We also have a video of Tour’s presentation at the American Chemical society (embedded below).

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