The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing applications has posed severe challenges to conventional memory technologies in terms of density, speed, and energy consumption. Herein, a single-ion transport mechanism is proposed to achieve picosecond (ps) switching capability. For monolayer hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) with single-atom vacancy defects, first-principles calculations reveal that single-ion penetration across the BN plane dominates the resistive switching. The trapping and release of a single ion correspond to different states of the memory device for one bit of information. Experimentally fabricated single-ion memory exhibits nonvolatile resistive switching with ultra-fast switching speed of 20 ps and ultra-low energy consumption of 310 aJ/bit. This high performance is attributed to the extremely short distance for the single ion to travel through. Such devices pave the way for the realization of high-performance nonvolatile memory with ultra-fast speed, ultra-low energy consumption, and high storage density, that is called the "Unified Memory" long desired by the whole industry.
@article{arxiv.2604.21940,
title = {Nonvolatile single-ion memory with picosecond switching},
author = {Hengxiao Cheng and Xudong Zhu and Zijia Su and Zhongbin Dai and Jie Yu and Zhi Yan and Xujin Zhang and Renfa Zhou and Juan Wang and Yuanyuan Shi and Zhongguang Xu and Lixin He and Chengjie Zuo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21940},
year = {2026}
}