> Normally it’s challenging to use [hafnium oxide] for memory because it has no structure at the atomic level – its hafnium and oxygen atoms are randomly mixed

> Normally it’s challenging to use [hafnium oxide] for memory because it has no structure at the atomic level – its hafnium and oxygen atoms are randomly mixed together. What on earth does this mean? Looks like a typically non-random crystal to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium(IV)_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium(IV)_oxide The actual article is open access, but rather dense: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg1946 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg1946 It seems they used amorphous hafnium oxide: > To create this amorphous nanocomposite, we added Ba to hafnium oxide during the single-step thin film deposition, and because of its simplicity of compositional control, we used pulsed laser deposition (PLD) to deposit the films. The PLD target had a Ba:Hf cation ratio of 1:2, which exceeds the solubility limit of dopants (with large atomic radii) in (crystalline) hafnium oxide, so that the formation of a second (amorphous) phase could be expected (22). Is that what the article means? Because it also then talks about adding barium on top of this, whereas you don't even get the amorphous phase without barium. Anyway, the paper also explains the deal with the Barium "bridges", which the authors call columns, fairly clearly (but it's too long to copy here). Other observations: - The authors seem to be very proud of producing this device mostly using "industry-compatible" processes, which i think means stuff you could do in a conventional chip fab, and where they don't, they have a story about how they could. This seems to contrast with other experiments in this field where the techniques would be very difficult to export from the lab. - Switching time seems to be > ~100 ns. Maybe that can be optimised a lot. And i don't know what that translates to in terms of latency at bus level. But that time is ~100x SRAM, ~30x DRAM, ~10x some of these other wacky high-speed storage technologies, but ~1000x less than flash. Could have those numbers highly mixed up, so correct me if i'm wrong. - There is some chat about "neuromorphic" functionality, where storage works like neurons. I won't go into the details but this sounds like a fad that is probably getting semiconductor researchers nice big grants, and will go absolutely nowhere.