Soon, see-through cellphone you can wrap around your wrist

Washington: A see-through cellphone that can be draped around a wrist may soon be possible as scientists have developed transparent, flexible memories using silicon oxide as the active component.

Rice University chemist James Tour revealed that the new type of memory could combine with the likes of transparent electrodes developed at Rice for flexible touchscreens and transparent integrated circuits and batteries developed at other labs in recent years.



Soon, see-through cellphone you can wrap around your wrist
“Generally, you can't see a bit of memory, because it's too small,” said Tour, Rice's T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science.

“But silicon itself is not transparent. If the density of the circuits is high enough, you're going to see it.”

Rice’s transparent memory is based upon the 2010 discovery that pushing a strong charge through standard silicon oxide, an insulator widely used in electronics, forms channels of pure silicon crystals less than 5 nanometers wide.

Soon, see-through cellphone you can wrap around your wrist
The initial voltage appears to strip oxygen atoms from the silicon oxide; lesser charges then repeatedly break and reconnect the circuit and turn it into nonvolatile memory.