Researchers Develop World’s Most Dense Chip

Researchers in California have developed a memory chip the size of a white blood cell - around one-2,000th of an inch on a side.

The chip can hold 160,000 bits of information which are crammed together so tightly that it is the densest chip ever made - about 40 times denser than current memory chips.

The achievement means that it may be possible to continue the exponential growth of computing power even after current silicon chip-making technology reaches its fundamental limits - which could happen in 10 to 20 years time.

The research, which was led by James R. Heath of the California Institute of Technology and J. Fraser Stoddart of the University of California, will be published in the journal Nature.

The latest research builds on earlier work by Heath and Stoddart to design molecular switches and produce ultrathin wires. The new work pulls the components into an integrated circuit.

It is not yet known if the new techniques will be commercially useful.