Great inventor is alien to most people

Stanford Ovshinsky has changed our lives, and his greatest invention has only just begun to be used.

Ovshinsky is a great inventor with more than 400 patents, including nickel-metal hydride batteries that are still being used to power many hybrid vehicles, and invented to mass-produce solar panels. thin sky. Ovshinsky is also known as "Edison of our time".

Ovshinsky has the Energy Conversion Devices research and development department, an invention studio like Edison's Menlo Park. Here, he has created many new technologies, including the two patents mentioned above. However, Ovshinsky's longest-lived invention was created before the ECD, when he was an independent inventor, stemming from a basic scientific discovery.

Ovshinsky started out as a mechanic and fabricator at the shops and factories of Akron, Ohio, where he was born in 1922. His first important invention was an improved automatic lathe, in 1946. After that, he continued to use automation in other devices. According to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics principle, he studied the similarity between machine control devices and the nervous system, creating an electrochemical switch in 1959.

Stanford Ovshinsky.

The device is based on a thin film of oxide covering tantalum electrodes, according to Ovshinsky, which is similar to nerve cell membranes. In a lawsuit litigation of this kind of material, Ovshinsky began searching for new materials, leading to his greatest discovery.

He focused on chalcogen, oxygen-based elements in the periodic table (that is sulfur, selenium, tellurium and polonium) and tested tellurium thin films mixed with neighboring elements such as arsenic and antimony. In 1961, the "Ovshinsky effect" was born, an almost instantaneous transition and reversed between resistance and electrical conductivity. Since then, a threshold switch has been established, turning on or off when the voltage reaches or falls below a certain intensity.

Along with that is dual-voltage electrostatic memory, a switch still conducts electricity until a stronger pulse returns it to the resistor state. These semiconductor devices include amorphous (non-crystalline) materials, a feat considered impossible before. In the 1960s, solid state physics processed almost independently of crystals, and it was believed that semiconductor devices such as transistors could only be made from crystal materials. At that time, Ovshinsky's discovery encountered strong resistance, but over time it was gradually accepted.

Recently amorphous materials have made more specific contributions. Phase change memory, operated by switching from amorphous state to crystal state and vice versa, is successfully commercialized for the first time in the optical version, where the laser pulse activates the change, the background CD and DVD platform. These devices were used in the 1980s, but the development of electronic version memory took longer.

To succeed, phase change memory must improve performance by reducing energy requirements and increasing speed. Research on optical memory has helped to produce chalcogenide needles (Ge2Sb2Te5) at a very fast conversion rate. Ovshinsky believes that the alloy will work better in electronic memory, because the experiment from his staff has confirmed spectacularly.

Ovshinsky died in 2012.

But even with this success, phase change memory faces tremendous competition from flash memory, which is heavily invested by chip makers. The phase change memory is clearly superior: much faster, requires much less power. However, it is also more expensive, and what the market wants is "cheap and good enough". For a long time, flash memory has always been cheap and good enough.

When Ovshinsky died in 2012, phase change memory is still waiting for its "time" . Researchers in this field know that silicon-based flash memory will reach the size reduction limit and believe that memory changes chalcogenide phase, works better when reduced in size, will replace it.

Most people think this can take decades. Therefore, everyone was surprised that in 2015 Intel and Micron bought the patent of Ovshinsky, announcing the XPoint 3D chip, calling it "a major breakthrough in memory and memory processing technology at the beginning." since the introduction of NAND flash in 1989 ". The details of this chip show that it is based on Ovshinsky's phase change technology and uses a basic design like his researchers created many years ago.

As 21st century information technology advances, the phase change memory of Ovshinsky, discovered over 50 years ago, seems to be his most important legacy.