The researchers, who published a description of the device in the November 13, 2003 issue of Nature, achieved the result by discovering a previously unrecognized property of the commonly used conductive polymer plastic coating called PEDOT. Their memory device combines this polymer, which is inexpensive and easy to produce, with thin-film, silicon-based electronics.

"We are hybridizing. We are making a device that is organic and inorganic at the same time." said Princeton professor of electrical engineering Stephen Forrest, in a statement.

Sven Mller, a former postdoctoral researcher at Princeton now at HP in Corvallis, Oregon, made the basic discovery behind the device by experimenting with PEDOT. PEDOT is used as an antistatic coating on photographic film, and more recently as an electrical contact on video displays that require light to pass through the circuitry. Mller found that can act like a fuse when exposed to high voltages, and permanently lose its conductivity.

A memory array made using PEDOT cross connections could be made so that a megabit would fit in a square millimetre, Princeton said. But the researchers expect to be able to form multiple layers and predicted that one gigabyte of information could be contained in a cubic centimetre.