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Atomic Scale Memory
maddugan writes "Technology Research News is reporting that researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material."
I predict 20 posts joking about how this memory will improve the performance of the next version of Windows, or being just barely enough for the next version of Windows.
I'll only need 5 drawers for my Pr0n collection now!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "atomic transactions"!
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Now imagine all that pr0n!!!
Do you realize how much someone can pirate with a handful of atoms?! Congress must put an end to this before it catches on and ruins civilization.
WHOA...
But will it be legal under the DMCA?
I wonder how long it'll be before the *AA asks for a tax on atoms "to offset the costs of piracy".
Movies could be 1 Terabyte in size.
Oh man are those guys gonna be pissed.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
"7,800 DVDs ought to be enough for anybody" - loconet 2002
[alk]
This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material.
Wait till the MPAA hears about this! Expect new laws banning possession of silicon crystals as a copyright circumvention device.
Just imagine if you scratched it like a DVD or CD, you could wipe out an entire movie with just a little one.
Imagine a Beowol^H^H^H^H^H^H.... oh wait... never mind.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to
store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pn
>:K
>;k
Geeze. I've had this on my Bitboys video card for years now. With this and the Xtreme Bandwith Architecture, it'll easily be the most powerful video card for years to come! Who needs nVidia and ATi, eh?
I've come for the woman, and your head.
.. mirror Kaaza just in case it goes offline.
Live web cams
So much for needing mp3's, we could just keep everything ripped at the 320 kbps wav with room to spare
or
we're going to need an mp3 style for the dvd audio songs (if that ever catches on)
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
More storage space than I know what to do with, for this week at least.
This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage. In fact I'd venture to say that this technology is NOT what we will be using in the future for extremely dense memory. Why? Because its 2 dimensional and requires an independent readout head (that is MECHANICAL). Making it work anywhere but a vacuum may be impossible. (though that is not a real problem : making a disk drive that has an internal vacuum is quite feasible) A solution that is thousands, even millions of times faster would be a system that reads itself : i.e. a 3 dimensional array of logic gates to form a molecular version of ram. In addition, you could cram far more bits per gram of material used for the media. (I can't say per square inch because that would be misleading) In addition, storage capacity is not what our computers need more of : its performance (especially in accessing all those gigs of storage).
RAM, Harddrives, or even many processors.
While I would hesitate to speculate on this kind of technology, if introduced, would mean an end to the way we think about storage and processing.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
What are we supposed to read this thing with anyhow, X-Rays?
I wonder how much control they have over the directions that the tracks take? . At the moment how wide are the Tracks on a CPU (couple of hunderd?) If it were possible to control the direction that the tracks take you possibly have a new way of creating the interconnects (albeit slowly).
Just a thought
Techie: Um, we've lost the corporate file server.
Boss: You mean it crashed?
Techie: No, it's working fine. We just can't find it.
"It is actually quite simple, and my graduate students make the surfaces routinely now," he said.
yeah, i bet its very simple, all he has to do is order them to do it! Thats as simple as it used to be to get beer before my wife left me:
hey bitch, grab me a brew!
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
At the bottom of the story, a key factoid: "Timeline: > 20 years" Holographic memory at 1 TB/cc will give this technique a run for its money on density and will probably be ready first.
Get a life!
Now, if I could only do it!!!
All your favorite sites in one place!
From what I gather in this article, this method uses the abscence or existance of gold molecules on a silicon surface to mimic the "1" and "0" of binary.
First off, if this is widely used, won't this be expensive? I realize that these are gold MOLECULES, not bricks, but how much gold would it take to put a cubic inch in every PC in America?
Secondly, I'm guessing that magnets won't mar these disks like they will current magnetic media. Granted, the drive will most likely have some magnetic parts, but perhaps this will make putting a subwoofer next to a computer case a little more safe. I realize that there's other stuff in a PC that can screw up if they come close to magnets, but at least if they screwed up I could take this meda and put it another machine without worrying about it being screwed as well.
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also, you could store the contents of:
149 200GB Fluid Bearing WD HDDs
45850 CDs
116400 256MB Flash Memory Cards
298000 Zip Disks
931300 32MB Memory Sticks
OR!!! 20696000 1.44MB Floppies
No offence guys, but come on. Post meaningful figures.
Its actually 250 trillion bits per square inch.
28.42 TB per square inch.
Now thats impressive.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.35.html#subj5.1
This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material
What are you doing? We're the slashdot crowd! If you mean 46.8 Terabytes, don't say 7800 DVDs.
"from the quarks-coming-next dept."
Dude, quarks have a hard enough time remembering where they are themselves! Why would you expect them to remember stuff for us as well?
This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material.
WTF is that? I mean come on...7,800 DVDs? How much is that? I mean howabout some actually useful, quantitative stats, that everyone is familiar with.
If someone will give me the conversion factor between Libraries of Congress and DVD's, then I'll volunteer to work out how much this baby will really hold.
.
What's that in libraries of congress?
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material ...how much data could be fitter in one *cubic* inch!
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
so will it be legal for the riaa to split atoms found to be storing illicit copyright material?
I can just see it now....
:)
Minimum system requirements:
8-32 Tb RAM
300 Exabytes disk space required
Windows DRM 2015
Intel Octium 7 10GHz or better
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
It's Ram/HDD, now all we need is it to become the CPU.
imagine how many copies of Beowulf you could store on one of these!
...by that time, we'll finally be able to run 99% of all 32-bit windows apps in wine!
Although the article doesn't mention his first name, "Himpsel" is Franz Himpsel. Check out his homepage here.
This article [http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/OEG20020319S0029]
talks about using a cell matrix which configure their neighbours at run-time,
something like the game-of-life or a more generic turing machine sort of thing.
This has lot of applications, including a highly programmable FPGA which
is very simple to fabricate or even complicate circuiry.
What really attracted my attention was the passage at the end:
>Cell Matrix has been working with nanotechnology groups, hoping to forge a
>new computing substrate from some type of atomic-level fabrication technique.
>Macias was impressed with work at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in which a
>matrix defined by erbium disilicide wires that address rotaxane molecules
>has been proposed as an atomic-level route to massively dense FPGAs.
Could this new research be an answer to these people ? Probably combining
the two technologies, not only do we have a massive memory-device, but
a massive computing device : Imagine an FPGA (or an ASIC) with a million
times more density!
DO NOT PANIC
Seeing as I currently attend UW-Madtown, this holds a special place in my heart... oh yeah, I'm in the Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics program, so that might have something to do with it too. Anyways, because I tend to remember cool stuff like this going on here at UW, I remembered another press release by us concerning Quantum computers. Yummy!
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
sure it's a lot, but this is the limit for some time to come... I guess I was just expecting more from something on atomic scale.
btw, 7,800, DVDs? come on, most people on here are literate, why not post some power of ten of bytes? btw, do I need to start with my explanation of how pointless measuring things in LoCs and HGs is yet, or wait till more of those are posted? (every damn time that storage comes up)
on the other hand, this is a lot of space... guess pretty soon I'll just have discs labeled "Music", "Video", "Software" where the title does in fact mean all music that exists :) just don't tell [RI|MP]AA (actually, can we just call the RiMpa from now on? kind of has a nice ring to it)
sic transit gloria mundi
BLOCK STRUCTURE breathing apparatus required for special maneuvers!!
In 1959 Richard Feynman said that all the information accumulated in all the books in the world could theoretically fit in a cube 1/200th of an inch on a side.
You can read the transcipt of the speech from when he made that prediction.
Feynman worked on developing the atomic bomb, he won a nobel in physics and is known as much for his scientific research as for his story telling.
________________
All my sig are fjdklafjkldafjkldafdaklf
this has for porn collecting?!?! It may soon become possible for the individual to afford enough storage, to have every single piece of pornography ever created by human beings since the beginning of time.
I have no words.
When DVDs are burned and read, you don't simply read raw data off. The information is, of course, encoded. The DVD (and CD for that matter) specification says to use Reed-Solmon encoding. Saving the long math, RS encoding is about the most advanced error-correcting scheme that can be implemented in low-cost hardware today. By encoding data this way, your DVD (or CD) can become fairly scratched, but still play. RS protects against multiple-point errors. However, there is a price to pay - for every ~33k byte block on a DVD, almost 5K bytes are used in the parity checks for the DVD. See this file for more gritty details about DVDs. This means your 4.7GB DVD really holds about 5.48 GB of raw data.
Now, why is this relevant? Harddrives use their own error correcting schemes too. Manufacturers have the luxury of creating their own encoding systems since they're the ones that provide the read/write mechanisms. You can't pull the platter out of one harddrive and stick it in another. Hard drives typically use CRC (cyclic redundancy check) encoding schemes. I know you have all gotten CRC errors on a floppy way back when - that's what it stands for. Anyway, CRC is much less efficent when you compare the protected data to parity information ratios. While I wasn't able to pull the actual numbers from the Internet or my old math books, you can find a discussion and sample math here.
When you boil it down and relate all this information to our magical harddrive, the maximum usable density of the data would hover between 85%, or 6630 DVDs/in^2, to 60%, a measly 4680 DVDs/in^2, of the listed capacity. This is all assuming that the ideal lab conditions are maintained for a consumer level product.
As always, beware what the numbers tell you. However, if this can fly, then it would be an awesome step forward. Once you get Windows 2010 installed, you might even have a few Gig to play around with!
Considering I don't store much money in my bank account, I sure as hell would risk my account being drained from $10 -> $0 along with the equal risk that its value will go from $10 -> 3.3E23 dollars. :)
It's sure as hell better than to use a gigantic "Laser" to get lots of money.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
That was funny :). If I ever got a chance to moderate, you'd get +1 funny :)
What's the point in having such amazing densities? If all the material one would want to put on such a data storage device is locked up in some legal way, what's the point?
Also if such a device comes to the market who needs compression? Imagine a non-compressed film at full academy resolution 2.35:1 aspect ratio, 3656x3112 pixels scanned at 4k. Of course we would need a display that could play back such a resolution. There is the IBM T221 (3840x2400)16:10 aspect ratio monitor but it only does 41hz. I would want at least 60hz refresh rate. Also music would no longer need to be compressed, I hate MP3 anyways. Hasn't anyone heard of sound quality? The quality of mp3 sucks. Give me uncompressed anyday.
See http://uw.physics.wisc.edu/~himpsel/nano.html, or this and Feynman's talk on the subject.
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
Make Journal Entry. Place Link to Journal in Sig. Make +5 Comment. Then people will see the issue you want to bring to our attention. :)
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe anybody would consciously name a format DVDA...
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
It seems to me that over the past several years lots of research has been done on possible storage medium, yet the basic PC storage structure has yet to change. I remember reading on /. where someone figured out how to get 10 gig on a roll of scotch tape, but I still have magnetic drives. Do you have rolls of scotch tape in your machine?
When and where can I buy some! How about some economies of scale too, so I can buy some and still get a car.
Seeing as this is still basically proof of concept, and I previously thought it was possible, I'm not all that impressed.
That the brain uses compression to store all this information, therefore putting more information onto the IMO insanely innacurate GUESStimate above.
;)
It almost kinda fits, if your drunk.
Information isin't 'lost' its simply compressed, and stored away in the inner-hub of your brain, allowing for the stuff you use more often to be put to the outer-ring so that it can be used faster.
Huh... kinda sounds like NFTS to me.
*runs around screaming* Aaah! I've got Windows on the brain! AAHH!!
I'm going to Quit Slashdot now.
later...
CDROMs use a large amount of raw data doing the same thing. A "700mb" CDROM actually holds around 805mb or so, but when used as a data cd that extra 100 goes to error checking.
"hail satan!" - little jimmy urine of mindless self indulgence if mac os is evil, what is windows?
What is amazing is not the part about the data density, but the part about the way this memory is written. It is done by adding and removing individual groups of atoms. This means that, unlike today's hard drives, it should be possible to completely and totally delete data from the medium.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Its also as old as the hills. IIRC, about 1.5 - 2 years that has been around.
AFAIK, there have been lots of reports on single-electron transitor for several years.
Though not ready for production, actual implementation do exist today, and since transitor has more area in application, memory-only device at atomic scale is not a news.
Try "googling" with "single-electron transistor SET", and you should find tons of resources on this topic.
pesky Madisonians, always coming up with crazy stuff like this. you gotta hate us. ;-)
-- haaz, who is pretty sure he'll never come up with anything resembling this. (and lives in Madison.)
-- haaz.
I have no words.
I have one:
JAIL.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pnu42 9-2.htm
/. I get the same problem as the original author, i.e. a space is inserted between the first "2" and the "9". Remove the space to get the correct address.
Queer. When I post the correct link to
Beal
bamph
If you read the article, you'll notice it takes them 20 atoms per bit. They use one atom to represent the bit and 19 other to hold it in place and mark its location when the bit is 0.
I lost my Library of Congress somewhere around here... please don't step on it...
\documentclass{article}
\title{The P/NP Shit}
\author{airmax31}
\begin{document}
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Getting enouch space to make the POS OSS called linux (perhaps you've herd of it. this is an os written by some half assed dweeb that lickes to licke little boys and molest your mom).
Or it could be enough for a shit load of OpenBSD.
and just enough for warcraft 3 to be played from ram for good speed (TM)
(yeah right)
To get an idea of the possible data rate with this machine: it took him 22 hours!
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
"Cubic Inches"
thats 681 THOUSAND DVD's.
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
Imagine the problems of using this to store election results in Florida. The resulting chad debacle would be a riot. Watching people using their electron microscopes to see if their favorite candidate really won for 72 straight hours on CNN would give whole new meaning to the phrase "As far as winning the election goes, I give him a small chance."
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Am i the only one to think that Saber-tooth Tiger bestiality would be a bit to much???
I'll tell you one thing:
- After you've seen a pre-historic drawing of a penis in a cave wall, you've seen them all.
Nuff said! =)
Would the atoms and electrons not be effect by rougue Neutrinos more than a normal hardrive, which obviously needs millions of atoms to encode one bit?
As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material.
It may be one inch square in cross section. Unfortuately its twelve light years high. Oh, well.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
So my whole DVD collection will fit onto 1 cm ;-)
where's all that Karma?
At least they're using their time _building_ something... even if it _is_ a pr0n collection...
With such density, doesn't it become more subceptable to EMP (electro magnetic pulse), sun flares, hot coffee, etc.?
or will they be incased in lead or something?
Should be 3.5e-21 DOLLARS per atom, and 2.8e-8 DOLLARS per TB, which happens to be 1/357000 cent.
The brain uses an intelligent lossy compression scheme.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Great, my desk is already cluttered with all my computer stuff, scanners, printers, hubs, etc. Where am I going to find space for a scanning tunneling electron microscope?
I don't want to be forced to buy anything new ever
again. Somebody tell these people that we are happy
with the floppy and will Never need more storage space.
ever.
finally be able to burn off my entire MP3 collection onto one disk. :-)
Actually, these miniturizations reminds me of a quote from a Scott Adams book (creator of Dilbert) (VERY MUCH PARAPHRASED SINCE I DON'T HAVE THE BOOK).
"I see computers getting smaller and smaller until one day someone phones the president and tell him that the entire dept. of defence computer system is gone because someone sneezed and left a window open."
~ kjrose
Finally! The technology is available to embed the Palladium chip right into their customers' bodies. This will save M$ millions by not having to produce all that proprietary hardware. Think of all the benefits: I can get updates for my brain at WindowsUpdate.com, I can let M$ run scans on me to upload my lifestyle preferences to make my computing experience more legal and enjoyable.
This just in... ..... gathering PORN!"
Thousands of geeks, after a quick smile and "woo hoo", all paused in silent awe realizing that this would free up about 3 hours a day, which could be used for
Oh, wait.
What do we do now?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"Somewhere on the way to the atomic limit is an optimum combination of density and speed."
Something tells me this is going to be the 32 atoms per bit that DNA uses.
That they had already accounted for this when the gave the size quote?
Well, if that damn SETI would get off its ass, and get us a dialup account GOL (galaxy online), we could start collecting alien porn. You know, that green chick Kirk did wasn't half bad...
Thats alot of porn!
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
I just can't believe anybody would consciously name a format DVDA
What's wrong? Do the initials for "Digital Versatile Disc[1] Audio" spell something lewd? Is a "duda"[2] something sexual in some foreign language?
[1] Yes, I know that the DVD standard does not contain an official expansion for "DVD", but this one was commonly used just before the DVD forum decided that there would be no expansion.
[2] U == V in Latin, and many jokes often treat U == V when adding up the Roman numerals in "CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR".
Will I retire or break 10K?
"I would not want to trust my bank account to a memory where a single atom could wipe out my savings,"
Still, he trusts the magnetic orientation of a metal disk or metallic tape. However, a concern would be if some of the atoms happened to be radioactive, so the gold and silicon would have to be processed very carefully to ensure that none of the atoms are unstable.
~Ben
also (approximately) equilivent to 366.6 billion closely typed pages of paper
Enjoy your life, it's the only one you've got!
Any bets as to how long it will be before some lab announces they use atoms to store entire bytes?
Their announcement will tell us that instead of that "old-fasioned moving of atoms" to represent 1s and 0s, the new technique changes the electron (or proton) count of an atom to represent up to one full byte of information in the same space.
Hmm.... what elements are stable enough at that many charge levels to do such a thing?
I do find it interesting that the access speeds and density of new memory technologies seem to be inversly proportional (and then some). We could probably write to a whole room full of conventional memory in the time it would take to full up a few bytes of this room-sized new memory.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I graduated from a UW daughter college and nothing good can come from Wisconsin. IT is a dead industry - don't believe the hype!
Bohring news...
HA! Right on, the obligatory Orgasmo plug - I was wondering when somebody was going to pull that out of their .... nevermind.
Imagine the creations you can make by re-arranging the atoms.
Hey! What kind of a monster is that????
It's not a monster, it's my MP3 collection!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
what about using carbon, and then enabling systems that will be built using nanofibers and such to have a two tiered processing/storage system. Imagine the parallel threading that could occur then
mod that one up its so funny that i was going to post it
Or even more if we learn to travel faster than light. That way we can go very very far away and start recording what everyone actually did since the begining of humans life.
unfinished: (adj.)
Thank you for this thought-provoking link. I'd love to see the slashdot hive mind discuss this.
Somebody mod this guy up.
Yeh, we'll have 0.0000000001 x 0.0000000001 pixel resolution for the solar system. Talk about voyeurism....
...that they mentioned needing to access the information faster than they currently do. Through the entire article I was wondering why they kept referring to accessing the memory in a linear fashion. At the density they are talking about they should look at reading all of the bits of a set of tracks at one time. If you want 32bit memory then you have 32 read/write heads. Each one picks up one on/off bit and sends it all back at the same time. Same for 64 or 128 bit information. Also, I wouldn't think you could put so many heads side by side - so why not arrange them on a diagonal or even separate the read/write heads by one or two tracks?
:-) Imagine having a drive which reads at 640,000 rpms (ie: 64bits * 10,000rpms). (Although that is like comparing Apples to Microsoft....er oranges. ;-) ) They would have to have a buffer to slow things back down. :-)
If the above were done (they were looking at speeding up their reading and writing by 100,000 times what it currently is now) then this would speed it up even more.
Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" speech is deservedly famous, but the earliest discussion I can think of of the absolute limits of information storage is in Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel, Between Planets , where the Venerians' secret plans are encoded on a tiny "message wire," hidden in a ring. The human protagonist is surprised that so much can be stored in such a small object, and some passing comment is made about the possibilities of atomic information storage. I think.
And, for that matter, the tiny mechanical hands described in Feynman's speech are very much like the "waldoes" in Heinlein's story, "Waldo" (1942).
Depends on the size of the lenses :-) We'll just need some photons here and there to reconstruct the thing. We'll be so advanced by that time. We can even have nanotech robots chasing the right photons :)
unfinished: (adj.)