AIBRIEF
A Fudan University team placed a one atom thick carbon layer in front of a flash memory "floating gate" so a single trapped electron can be read at room temperature, clearing a 1990s era barrier.
A 2D flash memory chip built at Fudan University stores one bit of data on a single trapped electron and reads it at room temperature, according to a paper published July 16 in Science. One electron per bit is the theoretical floor for digital storage; earlier attempts in the late 1990s failed because the electrical signal from a single trapped electron was too faint to detect, a barrier the team likens to spotting a single raindrop's ripple in a reservoir.
The team's fix is a graphene layer, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, placed in front of a floating gate, the tiny trap inside a flash chip that holds electrons when power is off. Electrons accelerate through graphene's low-resistance atomic lattice and land in the gate with enough signal to be read at room temperature. The researchers nicknamed the device "Guiyi," a reference to "return to one" in Chinese Buddhism.
Co-author Chunsen Liu frames the result as a response to AI-era demand for faster, denser, more energy-efficient storage. The device has not left the lab.
The milestone is a room-temperature read of a single electron in a 2D flash architecture. Before the physics becomes a product, the work still has to clear reproducibility, manufacturability, and integration with conventional chip lines, none of which a single paper can settle.