According to The Korea Herald report, a research team in South Korea has discovered a way to increase the storage capacity of memory chips by a factor of 1,000, while increasing the possibility of using 0.5 nanometer process technology.

The research team comes from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and is funded by the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation. The team’s latest discovery will enable chip manufacturers to use a new physical phenomenon to make smaller chips, and it is possible to expand data storage capacity by a factor of 1,000.

The report explained that the UNIST team’s research has found a way to control individual atoms in semiconductor materials and further increase the storage capacity of microchips and break the chip domain size limit.

The UNIST team found that by adding a drop of charge to a semiconductor material called ferroelectric hafnium oxide (HfO2), four individual atoms can be controlled to store 1 bit of data. This means that it is possible to store 500 TB of data per square centimeter in a flash memory module, which is 1,000 times that of current flash memory chips.