Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are developing new computer chips that combine tasks usually kept separate by design. According to assistant professor Jing Li, these “liquid silicon” chips can be configured to perform complex calculations and store massive amounts of information within the same integrated unit — and communicate efficiently with other chips. “There’s a huge bottleneck when classical computers need to move data between memory and processor,” says Li. “We’re building a unified hardware that can bridge the gap between computation and storage.”