China Unveils World's Fastest Hard Drive
Called Poxiao, it is capable of erasing and rewriting data in just 400 picoseconds
Researchers at Fudan University have unveiled “Poxiao” (Dawn) — the fastest flash memory ever developed — capable of erasing and rewriting data in just 400 picoseconds (a trillionth of a second). That’s 100,000 times faster than conventional flash memory and even surpasses the speed of volatile memory like SRAM.
Though the prototype currently holds only kilobytes of data, it marks a groundbreaking leap in storage technology, laying the foundation for a future where memory and computing blur into one.
Published in Nature, the research tackles one of the most persistent bottlenecks in integrated circuits: the speed limits of information storage. Traditional flash relies on slow “warm-up” phases to energize electrons for data transfer.
In contrast, the new approach — dubbed “2D-enhanced hot-carrier injection” — allows electrons to directly transition to high-speed states, eliminating delays and smashing theoretical speed ceilings.
“If we had just stuck with traditional theories or relied on material changes, we wouldn’t have made any major breakthroughs,” said project lead Liu Chunsen.
The implications are massive: once scaled, this could collapse the divide between memory and storage, making hierarchical architectures obsolete. AI systems, for instance, could soon operate with local memory as fast as their processing units — reading and writing as fast as they think.
Fabricated using CMOS-compatible tech, the chip has already been produced at the kilobyte level. The team aims to scale it to tens of megabytes within five years, with plans to commercialize the breakthrough.
This could reshape personal computing, enabling devices to run large AI models locally, with no separate RAM or storage required.
