Can house paint revolutionize technology? Apparently, yes!
Researchers discovered that titanium oxide, a component of paint, can store electrical data giving almost any device some form of computing power.
"Titanium oxide is one of the most commonly made materials. Every paint you buy has titanium oxide in it. It's cheap and nontoxic," explains Sandia materials scientist Alec Talin. "It's an oxide, there's already oxygen there. But if you take a few out, you create what are called oxygen vacancies. It turns out that when you create oxygen vacancies, you make this material electrically conductive. When it cools off, it stores any information you program it with.”
Titanium oxide can revolutionize the development of non-volatile computer memory advancing areas like voice recognition, image processing and autonomous driving.
"If we are trying to do machine learning, that takes a lot of energy because you are moving it back and forth and one of the barriers to realizing machine learning is power consumption," Li said. "If you have autonomous vehicles, making decisions about driving consumes a large amount of energy to process all the inputs. If we can create an alternative material for computer chips, they will be able to process information more efficiently, saving energy and processing a lot more data."
Learn more about titanium oxide (TiO2):
Source: Science Daily