Overview
- The peer-reviewed study from The Ohio State University appears in PLOS One and demonstrates edible-fungi-based organic memory components.
- Researchers cultivated shiitake and button mushrooms, dehydrated them for stable conductivity, attached them to custom circuits, and tested responses across varied voltages, waveforms, and frequencies.
- Over two months of trials, the devices repeatedly changed electrical states as RAM at rates up to 5,850 Hz with roughly 90% accuracy.
- Performance declined at higher frequencies, but connecting multiple mushrooms improved stability in a network-like arrangement.
- The team presents a low-cost, biodegradable alternative to rare-earth-based devices with reported resilience to dehydration and radiation, and they note future work on miniaturization, reproducibility, and potential uses in edge computing, aerospace, autonomous systems, and wearables.