The security chips could store encrypted data written two different ways -- electrically and magnetically -- making extraction of the data more complex and so more difficult for attackers to decrypt.

If they have success developing a new , devices the size of a current 1GB storage components could hold an Exabyte -- a million million Bytes -- of data.

The researchers, headed up by professors Harry Kroto, a Nobel laureate, and Naresh Dalal, also say these crystals can be made using less toxic and more readily available materials than current chip materials that almost always include lead. The new materials would use manganese and iron instead, Dalal says.

The main purpose of their research is to find materials whose crystalline structure can be used as the building blocks of digital circuits. Kroto calls this bottom-up design where the material itself provides the capacity to store data rather than top-down design in which structure needed to store data electronically are imposed on the surface of another medium. "The next stage would be reduction in size of storage elements," he says.