Heat is no friend of any kind of memory chip. That will be no surprise for PC gamers with our wealth of cooling systems and heat sink options—unfortunately, those solutions aren't suitable for every data retention situation. As such, a research team has developed a chip that will keep working throughout extreme temperature conditions.
A US team based at USC Viterbi School of Engineering in Southern California has created a graphene tungsten memristor that can reliably operate at outlandishly high temperatures. Per the team's paper in the journal Science, 'interfacial engineering' allowed for this memristor to operate "reliably up to 700 °C with an ON/OFF current ratio >103, data retention >50 hours and endurance >109 switching cycles" (via The Brighter Side).
As even the most hard-wearing silicon-based SSDs tend to fail at 200 °C, and the surface of Venus easily breaches 400 °C, you can understand the scientific demand for memory that can deal with the heat. T...
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