Throughout my semiconductor career, I have always been dealing with Non-volatile memories (NVM or widely popularly known as Flash). And my basics were from a Japanese fabrication plant under a pupillage of a great boss who had 16 years of Flash experience when I first met him. A team of Japanese researchers from University of Tokyo recently have a new breakthrough - cheap, disposable, flexible plastic Flash memory. The basic technology behind it is using an plastic substrate consisting of polymer and metal oxide. Without the need for silicon, it is cheap to process.
Right now I am thinking of the wonderful possible applications it will hold for consumers in the future like OLEDs in time to come. But also thinking of the amount of waste it will generate and hopefully, the material can be biodegradable. Check out the pictures from the Tech Review website linked earlier.
