In Washington, researchers have created a computer chip by sandwiching honey between two metal electrodes.
The team at Washington State University made a memristor, a device that can process and store data as memory. The device was about the size of a human hair and achieved on/off speeds of 100 and 500 nanoseconds, respectively.
The team hopes the simple concept will have applications in neuromorphic computing—devices that are organized like the brain’s neurons and synapses.
“This is a very small device with a simple structure, but it has very similar functionalities to a human neuron,” says Feng Zhao, associate professor at WSU’s School of Engineering and Computer Science and corresponding author on the study. “This means if we can integrate millions or billions of these honey memristors together, then they can be made into a neuromorphic system that functions much like a human brain.”
The findings were published in the Journal of Physics D. The group now plans on shrinking their memristors to nanoscale and bundle millions to make a full computing system.
“Honey does not spoil,” Zhao adds. “It has a very low moisture concentration, so bacteria cannot survive in it. This means these computer chips will be very stable and reliable for a very long time.”