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."

Comments

A single strand of hair

[addps4cat]

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

Re:A single strand of hair

[sh4de]

The obvious derivative unit for memory density would then be libraries of congress per strand of hair.

Humour aside, I think it's the marketing department again that thought people wouldn't grok units that look like bits per square micron.

That sort of unit isn't immediately accessible to most people, but messing with highly inaccurate, almost metaphorical, made-up units ain't gonna make it any better.

(My two bits per strand of hair)

Re:A single strand of hair

[Quikah]

Oh come on, most people DON'T grok how small a micron is. It makes perfect sense to relate it to something which people can see and touch. It really makes no sense to criticize making something a little more understandable to lay people. It is an AP story, not a research paper.

Huh?

[Golias]

Why do the guys at HP labs want to date memory chips?

Oh wait... never mind.

Still trying to get my mind around this...

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Can someone put this in terms that make sense for a normal person?
How many Libraries of Congress would fit in a ponytail?

Butter!

[Dark Lord Seth]

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...

Black (memory)hole

[jukal]

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.

Re:Hmmm. The article appears to be missing

[GMontag]

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 ;-)

Wow. Imagine....

[Bingo Foo]

...a Beowulf cluster of these would look like Chewbacca.

HP labs political manoeuvre

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:HP labs political manoeuvre

[Bingo Foo]

If you're posting from work, it's unlikely that anonymous slashdot accounts are enough to hide behind. I would figure that as someone who works at HP you would know this, so either you're offsite or SSHing around the firewall.

In fact, My employer is monitoring me right now, so let's give them a big round of applause for leveraging their core competencies, value-adding, and remembering that every client begins with "CLI" and there is no "I" in "Quit," and all that.

Heh. Well. Um... Ah, yes. You firewall guys know I'm kidding right? uh hello?

Dns?

[Viking Coder]

Ths s fntstc! Th mst dns mmry vr md!

Mb th hckrs knw smthng we dn't..

Someone is one smart moderator.

[Bingo Foo]

I'd sincerely like to thank the moderator who called this very little joke "overrated" at +4.

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.