Laptops in hibernate and sleep mode that drain battery life could be soon replaced by a new era of laptops after researchers at several US universities .They developed a technology that will instantly wake up laptops from shut down or sleep state.

They have developed ferroelectric material –which is commonly found on smartcards – on silicon, which allows to retain information after power is shut off with the help of certain transistors. Scientists from Pennsylvania State University, Cornell University and Northwestern University are involved in the research and development.

The new findings could save users time dynamically by instantly booting laptops from the shut down state. For example, a transistor in the laptop will be able to retain the state of a Word document on shutdown, and instantly reload the same state on reboot just like as we are getting after invoking the laptop after hybernation.

“It would be instant-on, meaning as soon as the power comes back on, your computer would be in exactly the same state it was when you turned it off and ready for action,” said Darrell Schlom, principal investigator and professor at the department of materials science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

Quick-boot capabilities are enabled in laptops and most mobile devices, but many are not able to reproduce shutdown states just like hybernation. Laptops usually never reboot back to their shutdown state, unless they are in sleep mode or in hibernation state, which drains battery power. Ferroelectric materials could do this, but without drawing any battery power.

The research could pave the way for a new era of lower-power, higher-speed memory devices, Schlom said. For laptop users, it could reduce the time to load an OS from storage devices like hard drives. The ferroelectric material could also retain data in case power is lost which will surely be a very powerful development..

The research revolves around building ferroelectric transistors – which can retain data in any electric state – on hybrid transistors. Ferroelectric materials are found in smartcards used today in Oyster and cash machine cards.

The researchers took strontium titanate, a variant of the ferroelectric material used in smartcards, and deposited it on silicon, putting it in a state where it could retain information even when power is off. The new findings cut the intervening layers that made it difficult to put the material on silicon.