Yu-Chueh Hung Makes Fish DNA Memory Device

Yu-Chueh Hung has used a medium based on salmon DNA to make a new type of memory device that can store data indefinitely.

Yu-Chueh Hung has used a thin film of salmon DNA to make a new type of memory device that can store data indefinitely. The feat is seen as a useful step in the development of a type of optical storage devices.

Hung’s group in the department of electrical engineering at Taiwan’s National Tsing-Hua University worked in a cross-disciplinary partnership with a group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

KIT’s Ljiljana Fruk led a group that embedded nano-sized silver particles in thin films of salmon DNA in such a way that the particles clustered when exposed to ultraviolet light. This medium formed the basic encoding platform that Hung’s group used to create a functional memory device. The film is sandwiched between two electrodes used to pass voltage with which to write data onto the device. Hung found that the device can retain data indefinitely, making it a “write-once-read-many-times” (WORM) memory device.

Hung and Fruk believe the technique can be used to design optical storage devices and may also have plasmonic applications. It also opens new possibilities for efficiently fabricating bio-friendly devices that may be embedded inside the human body.

Details of the project are published in Applied Physics Letters.

Yu-Chueh Hung was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She received the B.S. in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University followed by an M.S. and a Ph.D. at UCLA, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. From May 2007 she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Optoelectronics at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. She is currently an assistant professor in the electrical engineering department at National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan.