USB Flash Drives are probably the most popular means of data transportation around, but, for the time being, their storage capacities are quite far from the ones provided by HDDs. However, it would seem that things are about to change radically, as the Arizona State University's Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) has developed a very innovative technology, which might allow, at some point in the future, the development of terabyte-grade flash memory modules.

Thus, according to Michael Kozicki, director of CANi, the new technology promises to boost the performance, capacity and battery life of consumer electronics from digital cameras to laptops. Moreover, the memory modules obtained using this technology will be quite cheap, since they'll be using common materials and will be compatible with just about anything currently on the market.

It's quite a commonly known fact that current data storage technologies are rapidly approaching their limits. This is because traditional electronics begins to break down at the nanoscale, the scale of individual molecules, because pushing electronics closer together creates more heat and greater power dissipation. As consumer electronics such as MP3 players and digital cameras shrink, the need for more memory in a smaller space grows. "We've developed a new type of old memory, but really it is the perfect memory for what's going to be required in future generations," Kozicki said. "It's very low-energy. You can scale it down to the nanoscale. You can pack a lot of it into a small space."

The secret behind CANi's very innovative technology is nanoionics, a technique for moving tiny bits of matter around on a chip. Instead of moving electrons among charged particles, called ions, as in traditional electronics, nanoionics moves the ions themselves.

According to Kozicki, industry has already shown interest in the new memory and, if all goes well, consumers could see it on the market within a few years. "What it means is we could replace all of the memory in all sorts of applications - from laptops to iPods to cell phones to whatever - with this one type of memory," Kozicki said. "What makes this significant is that we are using materials that are already in use in the semiconductor industry to create a component that's never been thought of before."

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