Coming soon: Fashionable E-garments with memory retention capacity

Washington, Sept 27 (ANI): Integrating electronics into textiles will soon enable smart fabrics and wearable electronics, researchers say.

Jin-Woo Han and Meyya Meyyappan at the Center for Nanotechnology at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, developed a memory-storing fibre woven together from interlocking strands of copper and copper-oxide wires.

At each stitch along the fabric, a nanoscale dab of platinum is placed between the fibres. This 'sandwich structure' at each crossing forms a resistive memory circuit.

The copper-oxide fibres are believed to serve as the storage medium, as they can be moulded from an insulator to a conductor simply by the use of voltage.

This design can be used easily in textiles, as it naturally forms a crossbar memory structure where the fibres intersect.

The researchers developed a reversible, rewritable memory system that was able to retain information for more than 100 days.

The findings were published in the AIP's journal AIP Advances. (ANI)