Taiwan is one of the top four microchip producers in the world, and our local researchers are bringing amazement to the globe once again with its new breakthrough. Taiwanese scientists have developed the world's smallest microchip with the greatest memory power.

The 9-nanometer chip's function far exceeds the others, but we will have to wait for at least another 5 years before we can benefit from this technology.

Even though 3C products are becoming smaller and slimmer over time, they require an increasing amount of memory.

A National Applied Research Laboratories team has spent the past year developing the world's smallest memory unit, and recently achieved a breakthrough through the manipulation of oxygen atoms.

Although the 9-nanometer units are just one square-centimeter in size, they have maximum capacity of 500 GB, which can hold one million photographs, 100,000 songs, or an entire library's worth of text.

The unit has 20 times the capacity of flash memory available on the market, but uses 200 times less energy.

The research team was able to break through what had previously been a 10-nanometer bottleneck, and the prototype is expected to go into mass production in five to ten years.