Not by drinking it! Discover reveals how watching The Glenlivet whisky evaporates – and leaves an almost uniform stain, unlike splotchier drinks like coffee or wine – gave researchers the idea of using scotch to deposit uniform layers of conductive materials, creating an environmentally technique for manufacturing cutting-edge electronic components called memristors:
[Jinsun Kim and colleagues at the University of South Carolina] began experimenting to see if it could replace conventional insulating layers in an electronic component.
These insulating layers are often made of materials such as silicon dioxide and this has to be sputtered onto the surface using an electric field. “The replacement of traditional inorganic materials (such as silicon dioxide) with whiskey deposits has a clear benefit in simplifying the fabrication process,” they say.
The electronic device in this case is the memristor—a resistor with memory and one of the four fundamental electronic elements, along with resistors, inductors and capacitors. Memristors are still rarely used in devices, having only been hypothesized in the 1970s.
Memristors are simple in structure. In this case, they consist of a two conducting layers, one each of cobalt and silver, separated by an insulating layer, in this case of Glenlivet Whisky deposit.
When a voltage is applied across the device, very little current flows initially because of the high resistance of the non-conducting whisky layer. However, the electric field causes silver atoms to migrate into the whisky layer and these eventually form a conducting filament.
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The resultant memristors have various potential applications such as in random number generators and neural networks.
That’s an interesting proof-of-principle demonstration of an entirely new way to manufacture electronic components in a more sustainable way. “Our discovery of memristor activity hints at new functionalities of custom designed organic films, as well as industrial scale green fabrication of electronic devices,” say Kim and co.
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You can read Kim’s team’s research here, in arXiv.org.