In a quiet lab at Fudan University, a team of passionate Chinese scientists has redefined the limits of what we thought was possible in data storage — with a device so small, it could rest on the tip of your finger, yet powerful enough to potentially transform the future of AI.
They call it “Poxiao,” which beautifully translates to Dawn. And fittingly, it could be the dawn of a new era in memory technology.
Imagine this: a flash memory device that can erase and rewrite data in just 400 picoseconds. To put it into perspective, one picosecond is a trillionth of a second — that’s faster than a lightning strike, faster than your brain can register a thought. Right now, the prototype only holds a few kilobytes (just enough to load this article), but it’s not about what it holds. It’s about how it thinks. And it thinks fast — 100,000 times faster than today’s flash memory.
For years, tech engineers have been stuck in a tug-of-war between memory speed and capacity. High-speed memory like SRAM and DRAM are fast, but power-hungry and volatile. Flash memory is stable and roomy, but painfully slow by comparison. Poxiao may be the long-awaited peace treaty between these two warring sides.
So how did the Fudan team do it?
Instead of trying to improve speed with the usual methods — like heating electrons up to boost energy (which, honestly, has felt like pushing water uphill for decades) — the researchers flipped the playbook. They developed a new method called “2D-enhanced hot-carrier injection,” which allows electrons to accelerate instantly, no warm-up needed.
“We couldn’t keep relying on theories from 60 years ago,” said Liu Chunsen, the lead scientist behind the project. “If we had, we wouldn’t have made real breakthroughs. That’s why we started from scratch.”
The result? A flash memory device that doesn’t just compete with the fastest current memory, it surpasses it — even beating high-end SRAM at the same tech level.
This breakthrough didn’t happen overnight. The journey began back in 2015, with a bold idea and a small team. By 2021, they had a working theory. By 2023, they built a tiny chip with an 8-nanometre channel — smaller than the limits of traditional silicon-based tech. And now in 2025, the device has been successfully tested and fabricated, with sights set on scaling it up to megabytes and beyond in the next few years.
If they succeed, Poxiao could change everything. Computers may no longer need separate systems for memory and storage. Massive AI models could run locally, without relying on cloud infrastructure. And we may finally have the hardware needed to keep pace with the speed of human thought — or maybe even faster.
As Poxiao moves from prototype to production, the world watches. Because sometimes, the most revolutionary ideas come in the tiniest packages — and this one might just reshape the digital world as we know it.
