It turns out that an incredibly cheap and plentiful alloy can be used to make a functional equivalent to the human neuron, and more than one research team has already put it to work that way. GST, or Germanium-Antimony-Tellurium, is one of the mighty-morphing materials called a chalcogenide glass. But get this: the substance isn’t even new. In fact, GST is probably on your desk or in a drawer right now: GST is the alloy used by rewritable DVDs.

Chalcogenides phase-change from a glass-like amorphous state to a more crystalline structure when heated to a very specific temperature. With crafty application of energy, it can be switched back and forth with extreme precision, and very quickly (to the tune of 20 nanoseconds for an on/off phase-change cycle). It’s not limited to a simple binary format, though.

New methods of heating GST make use of more than just two phase states. Instead of simply reading every little dot of GST as either on or off, researchers are now able to read several different degrees of change within the same space. Sound familiar? Call the number four and you’ve got something that starts sounding more than a little like a qubit.

Now, researchers at both the University of Exeter in the UK and Stanford in the US have both managed to put GST’s phase-changing properties to use — in their attempts to synthetically mimic the human neuron at the nano-scale. Recreating neurons (and the synapses that link them) isn’t just something that nerdy people do for nerd points, a computer that worked through “neurons” would be able to perform monstrously faster than what we have today. A big part of that is a neuron’s ability to both store and process information at the same location (there’s no need for a system bus).

We may be entire generations away from anything close to a “neural net” like the sort that Mr. Data had, but putting hundreds of thousands of nano-scaled synthetic neurons to use as a processor isn’t so wild a dream anymore. It’s more of an inevitability.

This isn’t the first time chalcogenides like GST have made unexpected waves, either. Not long ago, another group of researchers at UC San Diego were able to successfully build a solid-state storage drive out of it. The drive could read and write data up to seven times faster than today’s NAND flash drives — and more reliably at that. IBM chimed in shortly afterwards with similar news for soon-to-be-commercialized applications.

Combine data storage (which is already just about ready for market) with processing, and you’ve already got most of what would probably be called a phase-change computer.

Aside from the cool-points that phrases like “phase-change” carry with them, building chalcogenide devices also has a significant bonus for the tech industry — it’s dirt cheap. So, while the first “commercial” quantum computer is on the market for a whopping $10 million, it may actually be possible for regular consumers to see phase-change computers enter their price range even sooner. That is, if researchers are able to quickly expand on the success they’ve enjoyed with a single synthetic neuron.

Read more at New Scientist