The rapid expansion of portable consumer electronics has created a demand for new designs of data storage devices with improved performance characteristics. Currently, there are three commercially available families of memory: dynamic random access memory (DRAM), static random access memory (SRAM), and Flash memory, which requires no power to store data. Consumer products typically use combinations of these three memory families, each having their unique advantages: DRAM is cheap, SRAM is fast, and Flash is nonvolatile. In the semiconductor industry, increasing miniaturization is beginning to place strains on existing technologies for data storage and computer memory, which could soon reach fundamental physical limitations. At the same time, rapid growth in mobile devices is creating a need to develop new memory technologies that can deliver low power operation and low standby battery drain. These trends have accelerated development efforts in universal memory products that integrate the best features of existing memory types into a single package and eliminate the growing technical challenges. A new universal memory chip should be cheap and compact, draw and dissipate little power, and switch in nanoseconds. There are several possible candidates for universal memory that are being actively explored by the industry. The technologies that have already found a niche in the memory market include magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), ferroelectric RAM (FRAM), phase-change memory (PRAM), and a number of other technologies are attempting to compete in nonvolatility with Flash memory and in speed and density with conventional SRAM and DRAM. In this article, an insight is given into a new approach to storing memory bits that is based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs). It employs a simple electromechanical switching rule, according to which the device is held together by a balance of three major forces: electrostatic, elastostatic, and van der Waals. Technically elegant and innovative designs of CNT-based electromechanical data storage devices exploit CNTs as both molecular device elements and molecular wires for the read-write scheme. This is an emerging area in the universal memory market, in which only the fabrication of the first integrated working prototypes and single demonstrations of electromechanical devices for storing, reading, and writing information has been achieved so far 1-7 . However, CNTs hold great promise for future bottom-up approaches to the manufacture of electromechanical memory devices, as the We examine designs and operational characteristics of a candidate for universal memory: carbon-nanotube-based electromechanical data storage devices. Memory cells based on the bending of cantilever and suspended carbon nanotubes, and the relative motion of the walls of carbon nanotubes are discussed. These devices show fast write and read speeds, high cell density, and allow nonvolatile operation.