USC engineers build memristor that runs at 700°C, breaking a core limit of electronics
Electronics have long buckled under heat, but a team at the University of Southern California says it has pushed past a fundamental barrier: a memory device that keeps working at 700 degrees Celsius—about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature exceeds molten lava and goes far beyond anything previously achieved for this class of technology.
In a paper published March 26, 2026, in Science, researchers led by Joshua Yang, the 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 nanoscale memristor that both stores data and performs calculations under extreme heat.
The device showed no sign of failure; 700 degrees was simply the upper limit of the team’s test equipment. “You may call it a revolution,” Yang said. “It is the best high-temperature memory ever demonstrated.” The component is built as a microscopic stack: two electrodes separated by a thin ceramic layer.
Jian Zhao, the study’s first author, fabricated it with tungsten as the top electrode, hafnium oxide in the middle, and graphene as the bottom layer. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element, and graphene—a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon—is renowned for strength and heat resistance.
In tests, the device retained data for more than 50 hours at 700 degrees without refresh, endured over one billion switching cycles at that temperature, and operated at just 1.5 volts with switching speeds in the tens of nanoseconds. The result emerged unexpectedly.
The team had been pursuing a different graphene-based device that did not work as intended. “To be honest, it was by accident, as most discoveries are,” Yang said. “If you can predict it, it’s usually not surprising, and probably not significant enough.” Follow-up experiments and simulations pointed to why it survives the heat.
In conventional designs, high temperatures drive metal atoms from the top electrode through the ceramic, eventually forming a permanent bridge to the bottom electrode that short-circuits the device. Here, graphene thwarts that process. Yang likened the tungsten–graphene interface to oil and water: tungsten atoms cannot attach to graphene’s surface and instead drift away, preventing a conductive bridge.
The team confirmed the mechanism using advanced electron microscopy, spectroscopy, and quantum-level simulations. By isolating the atomic-scale behavior at the interface, the researchers say the finding offers a design principle that could be extended to other material combinations and, potentially, scaled for industrial production.
High-temperature electronics have long been a goal for space exploration—Venus’s surface hovers around 500 degrees Celsius, and every lander sent there has failed in part due to extreme heat, beyond what silicon-based chips can withstand. “We are now above 700 degrees, and we suspect it will go higher,” Yang said.
The potential applications, they added, go far beyond space missions; geothermal energy systems, for instance, require electronics that can function deep underground.