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."

Comments

Cool!

[FyRE666]

I'll only need 5 drawers for my Pr0n collection now!

New possible high-capacity storage format, huh?

[Erpo]

I wonder how long it'll be before the *AA asks for a tax on atoms "to offset the costs of piracy".

MPAA/RIAA

[sdo1]

Oh man are those guys gonna be pissed.

-S

cant resist

[loconet]

"7,800 DVDs ought to be enough for anybody" - loconet 2002

Feh. Only ONE bit per atom...

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

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/pnu 42 9-2.htm

>:K

Re:Feh. Only ONE bit per atom...

[Christopher Thomas]

Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.

I seem to recall that a group used similar techniques to store much more than that (they wanted to encode a small image's bits).

The problem, of course, is that readout tends to be destructive, and you'll have a lot of fun trying to compete on a density basis with the solid-substrate schemes :).

I'm going to..

[Frank of Earth]

.. mirror Kaaza just in case it goes offline.

Re:PREDICTION

[Stephen VanDahm]

A better prediction would be that there will soon be 20 posts about how this new technology will allow folks to enlarge their pr0n collections by a factor of 10,000. I'll bet they're rolling in even as I type.

Steve

Eh?

[ShooterNeo]

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).

Re:Eh?

[sconeu]

Atomic scale \b{is} essentially a vacuum. It's the same size as or smaller than any potential nasty air molecules!

Re:Eh?

[jo-do-cus]

This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage.

This reminds me a bit of what they said to one of my ancestors, when he invented the wheel: "what good is that? What we REALLY need is something to fly, this 'riding' thing is just too slow and way too bumpy. Besides, where do you want to go anyway?"

It's this kind of mindless (an really cheap) new-idea-bashing that really irritates me...

We lost the file server

[SQL Error]

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.

Reminds me of...

[teetam]

a juvenile idea/dream I had when I was a small kid to use the electron's spin (+half or -half) to store the same binary information. A single atom could store a lot more bits this way.

Now, if I could only do it!!!

Other Equivalencies

[jstockdale]

...equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs...

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.

Quarks?

[Guppy06]

"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?

Re:No magnets? What about costs?

[John Hasler]

First off, if this is widely used, won't this
be expensive?

A small fraction of a cents in gold per 1000 terabytes. Your computer already has much more gold in it than one of these would require.

I realize that these are gold MOLECULES,

Gold ATOMS.

Re:mp3's

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Um, a 320 kilobits per second .wav would sound like crap.

CD audio is 44,100 samples per second per channel. Each sample is 16 bits and there are 2 channels.

That works out to 1411200 bits per second, or just over 1378 kbps.

Anyway, after working with 96kHz/24bit/multitrack studio equipment CDs sound like crap too. Which is what DVD-A is pretty close to. I think Vorbis streams have support for higher sampling rates, greater bit depth, and >2 channels.

Re:useful units

[Scaba]

I dunno. I measure everything in football fields.

Re:Think of the mpeg2 quality.

[Drishmung]

Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available for storage

Asimov's corollary to Parkinson's Law of data: Backlog expands to overfill planned extensions.

I'm sure we'll find a way to use it...

karma whoring

[flollywebfrog]

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.

Am I the only one who understands the implications

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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.

Theoretical density issues

[ssyladin]

The article states that the storage capacity of this new material/system is about equal to 7800 DVDs. Just to get nit-picky and technical, and to educate people some, this number will probably be lower.

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!

Re:that's it?

[glwtta]

From what I understand, the Human Genome, though it represents a massive amount of data, is also highly redundant with huge sectons of 'legacy code' that doesn't seem to have any function or purpose.

The actual genetic code is not much at all - roughly 3 billion base-pairs, considering you only need two bits for a basepair, you can fit the whole thing on a CD. When they say that things are "redundant" or "legacy" what they really mean is that they have no idea what is going on - contrary to what some people will have you believe, very little (comparitevly) is known about the genome.

I'd be interested in knowing approximately how much actual information is functional in numerical terms. If one knew that, one could say exactly how much data it takes to create a human being.

Like I said, the actual genetic code is very small (~750 MB), the next level of complexity is annotation on some of its function and variation (essential to any sort of understanding of what it does) and this amount of data isn't a set size, we (a small biotech) have roundabout a terabyte of it, Celera has 100TB

The real complexity with humans starts around the protein stage, and proteomics is far younger than genomics. Once we start studying/simulating biological processes on the cell-wide scale, then we'll get into the astronomical numbers for storage and computing power, which will see use for "atomic scale" technologies.

Anyway, with humans it's not really the number of bits packed into small spaces that's impressive, it's the amount of information packed into those bits.