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HP Labs Creates Densest Memory Chips To Date
Ruger writes "CRN has this article about memory circuits 10 times more dense than today's silicon chips. R. Stanley Williams, director of Quantum Science Research at HP Labs said the high-density memory his team created fits inside a square micron. That's so small that 1,000 of the circuits could fit on the end of a strand of human hair."
Once again they use "a single strand of hair" as some sort of SI unit. Something isn't small until you tell someone how many you can fit on a strand of hair.
- phranck@nycap.rr.com
Don't eat shrimp candy, just a heads up.
I thought Carly and the honchos from Compaq were killing all hardware level design work. This may be the last hurrah from HP Labs.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Oh wait... never mind.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Can someone put this in terms that make sense for a normal person?
How many Libraries of Congress would fit in a ponytail?
Actually, it does - Dictionary.com takes of -est and -er for the purposes of giving a definition (as everyone should know what -est and -er do to a word). Note that it says it found "dense" as the entry.
Has anyone noticed that we are constantly being deluged with a slew of new technologies/products/techniques, but very rarely do we actually hear of a new product being released that is based on one of the aforementioned technologies?
This space intentionally left blank.
It'd be interesting if it wasn't a joke... Whilst Slashdot's journalism is often a joke, that doesn't mean they post them intentionally ;-)
And the success rate for the manufacturing process was only about 20 percent. The biggest challenge was sticking -- something anyone who has fried an egg can understand.
"When we peeled the mold off, we had a material, or parts of the circuit, just literally pull away," he said. "That's a problem we have to address and improve in our processing."
The answer to sticky memory circuits is clearly to use butter, lots of butter. Hey, it works for the eggs and the guy said it was compareable...
Hate me!
This is alarming! If they continue making progress at current late, it will take only aproximately 42 years until they have created a memory chip so dense, that no bytes can escape, infact the chip sinks through the fabric of space-time. Any data within 42 square kilometers will be suck in through the event horizon. The only escape from being drawn inside is growing a big head, since the Schwarzschild radius is aproximately 30 cm.
...so now we have to wait for architectures fast enough to effectively use the data.
Ho, 64-bit archs: You're now only a quick-fix.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted; the operation requested by the application requires a current record./sections/BreakingNews/breakingnews.asp, line 131
;-)
Naaa, the hair their memory was installed on is blonde
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
...a Beowulf cluster of these would look like Chewbacca.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Carly and co. want to shed all the research and development departments here in HPC. Every single team has been told to show what they are working on will create a profit for the company within one year, or expect to be downsized. All research has stopped, its all development now. Every group is scrambling to get something published within the next few months, everyone is working on papers to get published at symposiums or mainstream press. Of course, everyone has updated their resumes.
I have to post anonymously because all our jobs are on the line and everyone is living with the fear of getting laid off. Another 10% are going to go soon, every department head has been told to choose their next cuts.
Well, just today, Slashdot posted an article about a forthcoming 320GB hard drive using, gosh darnit, aforementioned technologies. Is that good enough for you?
Read the article, man. They expect it to take five years for this technology to produce something you can buy at the store. By then you'll have forgotten about this story completely, and your illusion of ideas never producing products will be preserved.
HP Labs Creates Densest Memory Chips To Date
Great, we'll all have valley-girl memory in our computers by 2005...
CPU --> Store like 0C 0F 12 14 at totally !3789AC3
Ths s fntstc! Th mst dns mmry vr md!
Mb th hckrs knw smthng we dn't..
Education is the silver bullet.
A strand of hair means definate prof pf progress. Remember when they used to talk about how many of something they could fit on the head of a pin? A strand of hair is real progress, after all, how many strands of human hair can fit on the head of a pin?
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
bald people won't have computers?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We seem to see these super jumps forward in memory/store/processing power using various combinations of holography, molecular storage, quantum tunneling and warp space...yet I still see the same size memory available on pricewatch for the same prices.
When will any of these advancements be available for my machine? In a store near me?
--
Mike
-- Mike wildcard@illuminatus.org
I believe Doom 3 will take advantage of that, however the video card will still need upgrading.
As much as IBM researchers, etc.. would like to believe that silicon will die and be replaced in the near future I doubt it will happen soon. Producing memory with size on the order of a micron is virtually useless. At the moment the limiting factor in the fabrication of integrated circuits are interconnections. Yes! The little pieces of metal that transfer signals around the IC. Currently 90% of delay in an IC is no longer due to the transistor but instead is cause by propagation delay through the transmission line. As it is not possible to fabricate transmission lines that can actually connect to memory as small as is discussed here, I can not see how this memory can be utilized. Does anyone know of interconnect solutions that could be used?
Where the Music Matters
In unrelated news, Rambus' lawyers have filed a series of initial patents, intending to amend them later as more details become available. Ivanna Bendemover, Rambus' CEO reassured everyone at the standards group that this has nothing to do with the new technology, stating, "You can trust Rambus to only have the industry's very best interests at heart."
Personally, I'd see how long it takes to complete my "infinite loop" benchmark task...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I seem to recall people making memory, or at least ROM where bits were stored as single atoms just a few weeks ago (and on slashdot no less). Is this stuff more dense that that?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Play solitaire. :-P
My journal has hot
"That's so small that 1,000 of the circuits could fit on the end of a strand of human hair."
I can never understand why the mainstream media is so fixated with meaningless comparisons when covering science and technology. Is human hair some sort of benchmark in the memory industry? Do we care how many of these would fit on the end of a human hair? It seems like anything tiny is always compared to human hair ("fifty billion nanomachines could fit on the end of a human hair") and the benchmark for big things is the football field ("the solar wing is equal to the length of 200 football fields!"). Can't we dream up something more original?
I'm sick of waiting for those images to load.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Now, this may *look* like an ordinary head of hair, but...
May we never see th
Linearly additive, [-1,5] integer moderation is broken. I would love to see, as part of the "about" or "faq" on the left of /. pages, a statistical abstract of post moderations. At the very least, I'd like to see a histogram of posts' scores. I'll bet there are far more 5's than there are 3's. That's just plain wrong.
This isn't about karma, its about ordering the relevance/importance/whatnot of posts, and these are separate issues from posters' karma. What's a slashdotter to do? My personal leaning is toward lobbying Taco to implement log(percentile) scoring, maybe just as a user preference. Or skinnable scoring with user-defined functions, whaddaya think Taco?
IIRC, there were a lot of posters here circa the 2000 elections with all kinds of ideas on equitable voting schemes. Put some of that experience into devising a better moderation scheme and deluge the editors with stories and "ask slashdots" about it.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
The second is the memory element, described only as "an organic synthetic molecule" acting as a non-volatile memory. Non-volatile is good; that means instant-on laptops. As for what it is, they don't say, but their recent work has involved rotaxane and catenane (see Figure 2). Bit flips in those molecules are reversible, another good thing, since you don't want memory that gets tired over time.
This is all cool fun stuff, and I'm glad for it, but I had really been hoping for a follow-up of HP and UCLA's brilliant work on molecular combinatorial logic in January. If they could add an active gain stage to that stuff, they'd really have something amazing.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
This to match HP's densest management decision to date.
-no broken link
Who really cares if they've made chips a thousand times smaller than current chips, with a thousand times the capicty? With palladium coming its not like you're going to be free to do anything worthwhile with them.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Most previous enthusiasm for this idea was for applications where you want lots of area but modest density, like displays. It's impressive that HP made it work at micron scale. But it's not clear that it's useful.
It's more interesting that they made a smaller RAM cell. The mask and fab people were ahead of the device people early this year; they could fab a transistor too small to work. (That means the device physics people have to go to work on the problem.) This new gate may be interesting, with or without the "printing" approach.
Anyway, it's cool but I just want to run some numbers before we get too impressed. They say it'll be 5 years before this is practical, and it's a tenfold gain in density. Now, what's the expected gain in density over the same period in a Moore's Law-type expectation?
My trusty desktop calculator (a.k.a. Python) tells me that 2^(5/1.5) is 10.0793683992. Pretty damn close. So yay, we're still on track.
I wish the article gave more details, though. The guy I talked to had a much better description of how this thing works.
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