] Mohanty, an assistant professor in BU%u2019s Department ] of Physics, has carved tiny switches out of silicon, ] fabricating mechanical switches that are thousands of ] times smaller than a human hair. ] ] ] When put through their paces as data storage tools, these ] nano-sized devices were capable of functioning at ] densities that far exceed the physical limitations of ] electromagnetic systems and could retrieve information at ] speeds that cruise in the megahertz and gigahertz ranges, ] millions and billions of cycles per second, respectively. ] NEMS Switches as memory -- fast and dense |