 electrical engineering professor who led the research group. "We are making a device that is organic-the plastic polymer-and inorganic-the thin-film silicon-at the same time." The device would be like a CD in that writing data onto it makes perma- nent physical changes in the plastic and can be done only once. But it would also be like a conventional electronic memory chip because it would plug directly into an electronic circuit and would have no moving parts. "The device could probably be made cheaply enough that one-time use would be the best way to go," Forrest says. Hewlett-Packard researcher Sven Möller made the basic discovery behind the device by experimenting with a polymer material called PEDOT, which is clear and conducts electricity. The material has been used for years as an anti- static coating on photographic film and more recently as an electrical contact on video displays that require light to pass through the circuitry. Möller found that PEDOT conducts electricity at low voltages but permanently loses its con- ductivity when exposed to higher voltages and currents, making it act like a fuse or circuit breaker. This finding led the researchers to use PEDOT as a way of storing digital information. A PEDOT-based memory device would have a grid of circuits in which all the connections contain a PEDOT fuse. A high voltage could be applied to any of the contact points, blowing that particular fuse and leaving a mix of working and nonworking circuits. These open or closed connections would represent "zeros" and "ones" and would become permanently encoded in the device. A blown fuse would block current and be read as a "zero," whereas an unblown one would let current pass and serve as a "one." The memory circuit grid could be made SO small that, based on the test junc- tions the researchers made, 1 million bits of information could fit in a square millimeter of paper-thin material. If formed as a block, the device could store more than one gigabyte of information, or about 1,000 high-quality images, in