GoKawiilModern electronics power everything from smartphones to satellites, but they all share a major limitation. Heat. Once temperatures climb above roughly 200 degrees Celsius, most devices begin to break down. For decades, this thermal barrier has been one of the toughest challenges in engineering.
Researchers at the University of Southern California now believe they have found a way past that limit.
In a study published on March 26, 2026 in Science, a team led by Joshua Yang, Arthur B. Freeman Chair Professor at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Advanced Computing, unveiled a new type of memory device that continues to operate at 700 degrees Celsius (~1300 degrees Fahrenheit). That temperature exceeds molten lava and goes far beyond anything previously achieved for this class of technology. The device showed no sign of failure. In fact, 700 degrees was simply the maximum their equipment could test.
"You may call it a revolution," Yang said. "It is the best high-temperature memory ever demonstrated."
A Memristor Built for Extreme Heat
The new device is known as a memristor, a nanoscale component that can both store data and perform computations. It is constructed like a microscopic layered structure, with two electrodes on either side and a thin ceramic layer in between.
Jian Zhao, the study's first author, built the device using tungsten for the top electrode, hafnium oxide ceramic in the middle, and graphene for the bottom layer. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element, while graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon, is known for its exceptional strength and heat resistance.
This combination produced remarkable performance. The device retained data for more than 50 hours at 700 degrees without needing to be refreshed. It also endured over one billion switching cycles at that temperature and operated at just 1.5 volts with speeds measured in tens of nanoseconds.
An Unexpected Breakthrough
The discovery was not part of the team's original plan. They were initially attempting to create a different graphene-based device, which did not work as intended. Along the way, they encountered something surprising.
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