GIVING your digital camera a virus may not sound very smart, but a memory chip that incorporates millions of viruses may just be the fastest thing around.
By coating 30-nanometre-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles, it’s possible to create a transistor with very fast switching speed. Millions of these transistors could eventually be used in a memory chip to replace flash memory in MP3 players and digital cameras, for example.
A camera fitted with a virus chip would take a few microseconds to display an image, compared with the milliseconds taken by existing devices, says Yang Yang…
