By turning graphene into nanoribbons using V2O5 nanofibers as etching masks dramatically improves their memory storage density over silicon-based chips. By depositing V2O5 nanofibers on top of graphene and etching it with an argon ion beam, graphene nanoribbons with smoother edges of less than 20 nm wide can be produced.
Due to smoother edges, devices made from them have better performance characteristics. According to the researchers, the device produced from these graphene nanoribbons has a transition time three orders of magnitude shorter than those devices made from either carbon nanotubes or grapheme and key to the nanoribbon’s memory storage density is the small memory cell. The grapehene nanoribbons shrink these down to 10 nm scale.
They can be used as both static random access memories and nonvolatile flash memories cell for ultrahigh storage density applications and for digital logic gates