Slashdot Mirror
Ferroelectric Storage Density Tops 20KDVDs/Cubit^2
DeAshcroft writes "As reported in Technology Research News, researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation have demonstrated a prototype ferroelectric (as opposed to ferromagnetic) storage mechanism with density of 1.5 trillion dots per square inch. No word on why Japanese researchers are using square inches, but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit. Original paper appeared in the Applied Physics Letters."
In related memory news, an Anonymous Coward writes "It appears the the ever present pause between photo's on a digital camera might finally be fixed. A company now claims http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C1396/ ) to have kicked up the write speed on a compact flash card up to 4MB/sec. This means we lesser photographers can now get the right action shot just by volume alone ;-)"
For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The recoring area of a DVD is 14 square inches. So the density of this new recording technique is 14*47=658 times greater than a DVD.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
(assuming 4.7 GB DVD's)
Using the prototype, the researchers were able to read 25 kilobytes, or thousand bytes, of data per second, said Cho. This is relatively slow -- it would take 10 seconds to retrieve a 250-page book at that speed, assuming 1,000 characters per page. It is possible to increase the read speed to 3.75 megabytes per second, said Cho. This would make it possible to retrieve the information contained in about 150 books in 10 seconds. Current disk drives have read speeds of about 20 to 50 megabytes, or million bytes, per second.
So about 36 novels/hour.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ferroelectric density: 1.5Tb/in^2
8 bits to a byte -> 187.5GB/in^2
Hitachi's (formerly IBM's) 180GXP line packs 60GB to a platter. According to their data sheet, that is 45.5Gb/in^2. Convert to GB, and we have ~5.69GB/in^2.
When common HD technology reaches Ferroelectric technology, we'll have about 6TB in a top-of-the-line IDE drive.
His lab is here. Please try to stagger your access so you don't slashdot him.
The Japanese side of the main Phonon Device Lab has pdf'd scans of newspaper articles from September 10. The Japanese also uses 1.4 Terabits/sq. inch.
A drawing on the bottom of this page shows that his ultimate goal of 4 Petabits/square inch is based on a bit being stored in a 0.4 nanometer square, the size of one BaTiO3 crystal.
Interesting experiment on his page tells you in English how to make piezoelectric ceramics(in collaboration with Washington U.).
It looks like there are a whole raft of people from Tohoku U. at U. Washington doing nano-bio research, mems, piezoelectrics.. maybe sq. inch came from Washington. Their Center for Nanotechnology looks neat.
I wonder if they were involved in this storage technology development.
A 'cubit' is the distance from your elbow to your fingertip. It's about 20 inches.
Of course, he didn't specify what kind of cubit. (Biblical, Babylonian, Mexican/Aztec, Greek, Chinese, etc...) So a 'square cubit' could be anywhere from 324 to 707 square inches!
(And people were bitching about the meter being arbitrary?!)
Oh yeah... and cubits have nothing to do with the Imperial system, at least not that I know of. Bits/in^2 makes a lot more sense. (As opposed to square meters, then your numbers get ungodly huge!
=Smidge=
Ferroelectricity is quite analoguous to ferromagnetism (they borrow the name even, there is no iron in typical ferroelectrics). Ferroelectric is a subset of piezoelectrics; ferroelectric's polarization can be switch by either applying an electric field or mechanical stress. OTOH, piezoelectrics' polarization is unchangeable. Piezoelectric effect refers to the behavior when the material is under stress, charge appears in the surface of the material (piezo comes from pressure in Greek). It sounds like they are inducing 90 deg domain switching as storage. One problem I can already see with this is fatigue; because of polarization of the material, there is a dramatic change of sizes of domains undergo 90 deg switches (on the order of 0.001). So they either got a material that is very soft, like PVDF or something like that, or the macroscopic behavior of all these bits just even out the stresses.
3.000.000.000.000/25.000
= 1.200.000 seconds (to write a DVD sized medium)
= 333.33333 hours
= 13.888889 days
Why the US still clings to imperial units is beyond me.
:-)
Actually, for the simple reason that they're what the technological world was built on, and also the not-inconsequential fact that English units often tend to relate to the real-world better than thier Metric/SI counterparts.
This is NOT just an artifact caused by familiarity: For ordinary use, the English units are often just more convenient because thier sizes are more applicable to the problem at hand. For instance, in machining and design of precision parts, thousandths of an inch turn out to be considerably more useful than metric units, just simply because of the mechanics of material removal using common machining processes. This is one reason almost all machining in high-precision industries like Aerospace and Oil/Petrochemical/Energy is still done in English units. (Note that the recent NASA Mars probe debacle only happened when one group deviated from accepted industry practice of using English measurements and switched to Metric. (And without even telling anyone, at that!) The simple reason the error was not caught is that no idiot (except maybe a French idiot, they still haven't got over thier Napoleonic pride in the moronic Metric system) would use metric measurements in an aerospace context - it's just not done.)
Another good example of the oh-so-awkward size of metric units is the liters/100km unit that has to be used to measure fuel econonomy in reasonably sized numbers. Ugh. There are dozens of other examples.
Units are somewhat arbitrary, but to be honest, in my engineering career, I've seen many more errors with Metric units (decimal point errors, imagine that!) than I have with the English system.
HELP STAMP OUT THE METRIC SYSTEM!
P.S.: Of course, what we really need to adopt is a correct measurement system based on Dublins, that perfect unit of length between a yard and a meter, where the acceleration of gravity here on earth would be 10 Dublins/s^2. Physics and engineering students worldwide would celebrate my birthday with fireworks and parties.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last