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The technology uses a material called antimony telluride to store data as an arrangement of atoms, rather than current RAM chips which hold electrons in 'on' and 'off' states.

The advantages of the method - known as Ovonic memory - is that it does not require power to maintain its state. The same is true of flash memory, but antimony telluride has an advantage over that too.

While flash is composed of individually wrapped layers of mineral oxide, making the chips expensive and difficult to miniaturise, antimony telluride is cheap and appears to perform

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better when reduced in sized.

Antimony telluride in its normal state comprises a mass of jumbled atoms. However an electrical pulse can warm it enough to rearrange the atoms into neat, crystalline rows. This alters the conductivity of the material which a computer can then detect.

Because the material retains its state without needing to be continuously charged, computer boot times could be reduced to next to nothing, while its suitability for miniaturisation could vastly increase the capacity of portable devices.

Flash memory cannot currently be made any smaller than 65nm across; the new Ovonic memory cells could be as small as 10nm.

The theory behind Ovonic has been around since the 1960s but it has taken until now to find a material that can constantly change state without degrading. However there are still problems to be overcome, not least that by miniaturising the cells, they may be liable to become crystalline at lower temperatures with the subsequent effects on data reliability.

The research paper is published online by Nature Materials.