In a study published in Journal of Physics D, the researchers show that honey can be used to make a memristor, a component similar to a transistor that can not only process but also store data in memory.
For the study, Zhao and first author Brandon Sueoka, a WSU graduate student in Zhao’s lab, created memristors by processing honey into a solid form and sandwiching it between two metal electrodes, making a structure similar to a human synapse.
The WSU engineers created the honey memristors on a micro-scale, so they are about the size of a human hair.
Transferring data through all these mechanisms from input to processing to memory to output takes a lot of power at least compared to the human brain, Zhao said.
The human brain has more than 100 billion neurons with more than 1,000 trillion synapses, or connections, among them.
Several companies, including Intel and IBM, have released neuromorphic chips which have the equivalent of more than 100 million “neurons” per chip, but this is not yet near the number in the brain.
Many researchers, including Zhao’s team, are searching for biodegradable and renewable solutions for use in this promising new type of computing.
The talk, “Land as Sacred Text: How Climate Change Will Impact Indigenous Spirituality,” will take place at 3 p.m.
The lecture will also be livestreamed via Zoom.