Researchers Print Electronic Memory On Paper

MTorrice (2611475) writes Electronics printed on paper promise to be cheap, flexible, and recyclable, and could lead to applications such as smart labels on foods and pharmaceuticals or as wearable medical sensors. Many engineers have managed to print transistors and solar cells on paper, but one key component of a smart device has been missing—memory. Now a group of researchers has developed a method that uses ink-jet technology to print resistive random access memory on an ordinary letter sized piece of paper. The memory is robust: Engineers could bend the device 1,000 times without any loss of performance. The memory is not yet very dense, but could be: "Each silver dot they printed was approximately 50 microns across and separated from its neighbor by 25 microns, so each bit of memory is 100 microns on a side. At that size, a standard 8.5- by 11-inch piece of paper can hold 1 MB of memory. Der-Hsien Lien, the paper's lead author, says existing ultrafine ink-jet technology can produce dots less than 1 micron across, which would allow the same piece of paper to hold 1 gigabyte. Reading and writing the bits takes 100 to 200 microseconds"

Density

[mythosaz]

What's the current density of machine-readable written information on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper?

I'm going to guess more than a meg.

Re:Density

[mythosaz]

Paper is already at least WORM, and depending on your format, randomly-accessible.

I don't suggest that this isn't interesting, I'm just asking a question about machine readable printed information density.

How many distinct characters or pixels can we reliably scan in from an 8.5x11 sheet of paper? What density of information allows us to have 4 or 8 or 16 or 256 colors of pixels?

Re:Density

[Ravaldy]

I don't think most people understand the application for this.

Printing RFIDs has existed for many years now (at least 10 that I know of) and is mostly used for quickly scanning contents of a box without having to handle each item inside of it. It is also used to track inventory leaving an area (e.g. a tool storage room).

Adding memory to this equation means you can store data on the paper until the transaction is complete. I can't come up with a reason for this on the spot but I can imagine there are processes that could benefit from it.

From a security standpoint you could store an encrypted password on the paper... Much easier than having to type a 256 character passcode.