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Buckminsterfullerene Strikes Again - Nanotube RAM
putaro writes "Nanotube based RAM, under development by Nantero, promises to deliver densities of over 1 terabit per cm^2, is non-volatile and faster than current DRAM. The Economist has a nice story. Forget about just kicking DRAM's and FLASH's butt, is this finally the end of magnetic storage as well?"
Its still 10 years off. Let me know when you can buy one...
A new type of computer memory uses carbon, rather than silicon
WAITING for a computer to turn on is a nuisance. That is why manufacturers have been trying to create "non-volatile" memories. These would be fast, like the random-access memory (RAM) chips that are currently used for often-accessed memory, but they would also continue to store information even without power, like hard drives, which are too slow to use except for long-term storage.
Several technologies have been competing to become the standard for fast, non-volatile memory. The best known is magnetic RAM, which IBM and Motorola are touting. Others are based on polymers or on strange-sounding metal alloys called chalcogenides that change shape when an electric charge is applied to them. But there is now a new entrant to the field: carbon.
Carbon comes in many forms. Diamonds and graphite are two of the most familiar ones. A less familiar variety is the nanotube, also known as a "buckytube" after Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes have a framework similar to the arrangement of the atoms in a nanotube. Nanotubes consist of a cylindrical array of carbon atoms whose diameter is only about 1 nanometre (a billionth of a metre). If Nantero, a firm based in Woburn, Massachusetts, proves correct, such tubes will soon be an integral part of computer memories.
Nantero's memory chips consist of billions of nanotubes, each a few hundred nanometres long, suspended from a silicon wafer. Another wafer sits about 100 nanometres below the first. Because the nanotubes that Nantero uses conduct electricity, a small electric charge at one point on the second wafer will draw several dozen nanotubes towards it. Once they are there, they stay there. That is because they are bound by Van der Waals forces--intermolecular bonds that do not depend on external power for their maintenance. An additional application of current, however, will release the nanotubes. This means that a group of a few dozen nanotubes can act as a memory element, storing a single bit (either a one or a zero) of the binary code that computers use to operate. If the connection between the wafers is live at a particular point, the bit represented is a one. If not, it is a zero.
If nanotubes were not so small, this would not be a big deal. Because they are, though, Nantero's technology can already achieve a data density considerably higher than existing RAMs. And because the wafers are so close together, those data can move rapidly from place to place. Nantero's new memory can read or write a bit in as little as half a nanosecond (billionth of a second). The best RAM chips, by contrast, need ten nanoseconds to perform a similar operation.
At the moment, Nantero has only a working prototype. But the firm aims to have memories on the market within a year. It thinks it will be able to tool up for commercial production quickly, because the fabrication technique it uses, though novel, relies on standard semiconductor-making technology.
The main difficulty faced by others who have tried to go down the buckytube route is getting the tubes to align with each other when they are hung from the first wafer. Until now, the approach has been to try to grow all of the tubes in the correct orientation to start with. But Nantero's founders came up with a simpler, if less elegant, solution. They use established lithographic techniques to get rid of tubes that are pointing in the wrong direction by zapping them with an electron beam. That leaves only those that are hanging down towards the opposite wafer.
Though the recent chip is certainly impressive, the reason for getting excited about Nantero is not so much the present as the future. Unlike silicon, which is pushing against its physical limitations, carbon-nanotube technology is in its infancy. Greg Schmergel, Nantero's boss, says that within the next few years the firm's engineers may be able to achieve data densities of a trillion bits per square centimetre (more than 1,000 times that available on existing RAM) and it will be possible to read those memories 100 times faster than can be done at the moment. The days of silicon-based memory may be numbered
Something else I can stare longingly at on newegg while knowing full well i'll have to sell my wife and 2 pints of plasma to actually buy it...
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
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Need a calculator?
Here's a little details that pretty much summarize the docs:
How it works. Nantero's memory chips consist of billions of nanotubes, each a few hundred nanometres long, suspended from a silicon wafer. ... This means that a group of a few dozen nanotubes can act as a memory element, storing a single bit (either a one or a zero) of the binary code that computers use to operate. If the connection between the wafers is live at a particular point, the bit represented is a one. If not, it is a zero.
Speed. Nantero's new memory can read or write a bit in as little as half a nanosecond.
Availability. At the moment, Nantero has only a working prototype. But the firm aims to have memories on the market within a year.
Hurdles. The main difficulty faced by others who have tried to go down the buckytube route is getting the tubes to align with each other when they are hung from the first wafer. Until now, the approach has been to try to grow all of the tubes in the correct orientation to start with. But Nantero's founders came up with a simpler, if less elegant, solution. They use established lithographic techniques to get rid of tubes that are pointing in the wrong direction by zapping them with an electron beam. That leaves only those that are hanging down towards the opposite wafer.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
This guy is right...
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
Get some people working on power supplys and rod logic, and dimond age here we come.
Someone should be able to make a decent mp3 player with this stuff...
Is there anything nanotubes CAN'T do? It seems like new uses are being discovered for them every day.
Though the idea of using a material that burns when exposed to a camera flash, for storage, is a little unnerving... Anyone know how they plan to address that and other problems/inherent properties of nanotubes?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
>over 1 terabit per cm^2
So, in terms of actual storage space in the computer, this means...what?
Twenties Retirement
1 terabit per cm^2...
I can write a byte's worth on a cm^2 piece of paper; Just repeat many times and stack; when measuring measure from above.
"Nantero, Inc. Creates an Array of Ten Billion Nanotube Bits on Single Wafer Standard Semiconductor Processes Used"
Sounds like the real deal....
Bitter... No, not me.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
They said it uses standard semi-conductor manufacturing processes.
While that's no real guarantee, it does imply it shouldn't be much more than what we currently spend on this stuff. Especially once they get to a big enough bulk the plants should be common and efficient. (initial implementations of facilities tend to be more expensive, from what I've gathered)
Now i can store infinite ammounts of pr0n in my memory!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Doom 3 at a reasonable FPS, RAM drives to help the /. effect and Windows running at decent speeds?
I wish...
Does it resist EMP? Flux pods? Stray magnetism? Heck, would lots of radiation corrupt it?
Given the description of how it works, I wonder if it will be inherently less durable against electric shock than current hardware. We've heard the advantages, it'll be interesting to hear what the disadvantages might be. Things like failure rate and recovery methods come to mind. Definetly worth watching though!
Ryan Fenton
For those who are interested, the Nantero's technology is based on earlier work in the lab of Charles M. Lieber. The original paper was published in the journal Science. Rueckes et al, Science, Vol 289, P. 94. Rueckes went on to found Nantero.
The original experiment worked as follows:
The original experiment was done with bundles of carbon nanotubes. In principle, the concept should work at much higher densities for single nanotubes, but the technology still has hurdles to cross. Currently, the tubes conduct because ropes of tubes are likely to contain both semiconductor type and metal type tubes. Since metal type tubes are fantastic conductors, having even a few of them in a rope will allow a device to work. However, when one crosses the threshold to single nanotubes, the device will only work if the tubes are metal type. Hence, an important problem will be finding a way to produce only metal type single walled nanotubes. Currently, carbon nanotubes are produced in a mixture of semiconductor type and metal type nanotubes. It's difficult to control that property because it depends sensitively on the way the sp2 bonds on the nanotube sidewall line up, something that no one yet knows how to control.
I would say--assuming this is a viable and workable item, that it would depend more on how much of this process they are claiming is theirs. So whether you or I can afford it is probably more directly related to how many different plants are manufacuring it.
Sounds like this type of memory will be extremely sensitive to radiation, making single event upsets of stored bits very likely.
Vote for Pedro
I'll be able to start a Java applet in Mozilla running on top of KDE.
Just kidding, in fact I just want to run Nautilus.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
You couldn't even track it by user at the OS level (user a has memory x and y allocated, so user b can't use that.) because I could still boot it into a different OS through a removable drive...
Of course, you could just eliminate all caches of keys or passwords... But do you really want to have to re-enter your slashdot password everytime you hit refresh, or click on a link to the comments page, or click to read a reply?
Maybe the solution would be to specify a certain area of RAM that would get initialized on power-up (be it a reboot or just waking up from an NVRAM suspend), and get apps to put any sensitive information in that area... Which would probably require additions to your favorite OS's API, in addition to new versions of a lot of apps...
Just thinking 'out loud' here... Anybody else thought about this?
Instead of using these directly as ram, could they sell them as a ram drive? Basically just have some software supporting it, but have the harddrive at boot just start dumping itself onto this nano drive thing. and at some point do a switchover to that being say.. the C drive?
;-)
after about 30 minutes an entire hard drive could be there, and it could connect via some standard connector. use the hard drive as secondary storage backup, and when the machine turns off, it dumps the harddrive back on it at bootup.
Of course I havent really gone through the idea hurtles on the thinking on that, but just an idea
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
You don't really want it compatible with RAM. What OS could possibly address it?
I'm betting that when this first comes on the market, it's packaged in hard-disk sized boxes and has a SCSI connector.
The subject says it all....
What's under yellowstone?
How did we go from "within the next few years the firm's engineers may be able to achieve data densities of a trillion bits per square centimetre" (quote from the article, emphasis mine), to "promises to deliver densities of over 1 terabit per cm^2" ?? There is no promise there, just a "maybe".
This is how big their protoptype is from their website:
"Dr. Thomas Rueckes, Chief Scientific Officer
and Co-Founder said, "This gets around
the problem that nanotubes cannot reliably be
grown in large arrays. At the end of our
process only the nanotubes in the correct
positions are remaining. This process was
used to make a 10Gb array now, but could easily
be used to make even larger arrays--
the main variable now controlling the size is the
resolution of the lithography equipment."
It also means you could put your entire hard-drive onto a credit card and have enough room to add your genetic sequence to encrypt it all with.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Oops, sorry. I forgot cases, where usually there is not enough of power sockets and spaces for additional hard-drives. And don't forget floppy drives - they are still here, in most PCs I see in the store.
I can easyly imagine to see, in a year or two, a PC with several TB of nanotube-based RAM and 1.44MB floppy drive, all connected to AOL with 56K modem.
Less is more !
It's a very cool idea, but I'm wondering why they didn't mention these issues. Is it an unmentioned limitation of the technology, or a limitation of the Economist's journalistic scope?
There was an article I seen on newsforge not to long ago about MySQL using RAM databases.
The article can be found here with my original commentary (which i cant be bothered repeating).
This will be amazing, Intel and AMD will license the technology.
Imagine a CPU with 1GB of L1 cache. All of windows in cache, now that's a fast boot.
... for 64-bit addressing.
If you have this wonderfully fast and compact memory, the simplest way to exploit it is to access it in a linear manner with a whompin' huge address space.
Who needs VM? -- Actually, we'll still need mechanisms to isolate processes from each other, so virtual addressing will still have a place. But not as a means to accomodate logical address spaces larger than physical address spaces.
I want a fuel-cell powered, IBM 970 Powerbook with buckytube memory and an OLED display. Never mind the power switch, I'll just refuel it every other month or so.
Where do I invest in this nanotube technology. Every 10 seconds these thigns have another use that is lighyears ahead of anything we have now. One day I'll wake up and pull off my Nanotube based dirt proof - tempeture regulated blankets, step out of bed and go to the bathroom where I turn on my nanotube fillament based lights which last 10,000 years. I'll use the nanotube based super computer inside my razor to give me the perfect shave with no razor burn. Then Ill head into the kitchen and pour myself a big bowl of nanotube-crunch...
But seriously, is there anything these thigns can't do? And where can I get a peice of the action?
Wanna bet that the RIAA's gonna want a tax so high on this technology that it will become completely impractical to ever own?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Interesting, but how do we get rid of them safely without getting the nanotube particles into our lungs etc, or is this not a problem?
A blog I run for the wealth
It doesn't change anything. Like you said you can get this now. I work in security and ANY system that a knowledgeable person can lay hands on they OWN it. As part of my job I do security audits and I have this little stickers that say "I OWN THIS" if I can get close enough to put a sticker on it then the statement is true. I doubt that will every change, but who knows what the future holds.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Scientists at MIT announced today the latest in a long series of commercially viable nanotube products. Following up ultrastrong rope, room-temperature superconductors, and ultra fast and dense memories, they unveiled the worlds smallest, lightest sippy straw.
While some problems remain with the "BuckyStraw", they have demonstrated a mosquito using one to enjoy a blood feast through an alpacca sweater. Among the barriers to full commercialization are figuring out how to bend the little buggers to make high tech SillyStraws, fabricate little folds so they can be bent to allow sipping while reclining, and reducing the internal friction so that ordinary humans, not just $1,000 an hour prostitutes, can produce enough suction to raise fluids more than a few angstroms in height.
A comercial product is expected within a year. Interested investors can post their email address or PayPal account number for a prompt courteous reply.
Couldn't they encrypt the cache or something like that to secure it?
glass.com/ing
how are they going to wire the thing? Suppose the nanotubes are grown, properly aligned and so on. How are they going to place the wires between them? AFAIK, the current technology for wiring the chips is exactly the same that puts the transistors, namely the photo-process. Obviously, this si not going to work on the scale of nanotubes.
Umm no. Cookies were never meant to be part of a secure layer. They are transmitted in plaintext over non-secure layers (e.g. http). Therefore the damage is done before your browser even saves the cookies to the hard drive.
Why not encrypt them anyway? So the user can readily verify what the cookes are storing. So the user can see where they are from, and delete cookies he doesn't like.
Encrypting cookies on the hard drive would simply treat one symptom without addressing the problem
Flush the RAM as part of the shutdown procedure.
Modify the Kernel so the last thing it does is wipe the RAM clean.
It has to be on shutdown, or someone can pop open the computer and take out the RAM without booting it.
Or, design each RAM chip to dump its own data if it doesn't get a fresh charge from the motherboard every so often. This way, even if all attempts to flush RAM fail, the chip wipes itself clean before the power LED fades.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Using this technology requires rebuilding entire system busses to use it effectively.
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Well, if you use an 8 terabyte equivalence for 1 Library of Congress (the actual definition seems to be a bit slippery, and that's the first one I found on a Googling)...
.62 to .73 inches thick, but since we don't know how thick nano-ram is, let's just assume a wafer the size of an iPod).
Theoretical Nano-Ram storage capacity == 1x10^12 bits / cm^2
1x10^12 bits = 1.25x10^11 bytes = 116.4 Gigabytes
That's 0.114 Libraries of Congress per cm^2.
An iPod, according to Apple's website, is 4.1 by 2.4 inches (it's also
1in = 2.540cm
4.1in = 9.840 cm
2.4in = 6.096 cm
Let's chop a cm off each of those to account for the casing, structural bits, and soldering points that aren't actually storage space. That gives us a size of 8.840cmx5.096cm for our hypothetical nanoPod (so on a tangent, how long before some company introduces the new 'e' and starts dubbing products 'nRAM', the 'nPod', 'nTel nSide', etc?). That's a surface area of 45.049cm^2.
Given our previous determination that we can store 0.114 LoC on 1cm^2, we arrive at a figure of 5.136 LoC/i(or LoC/n for nPod, as the case may be).
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
If you're about to redesign the hardware from scratch, then this stuff should just go into the RAM slots. But given the choice between "wait five years for a bus and OS redesign" and "get a SCSI drive right now that Really Screams, that goes in your normal HD slot and plays nice with your legacy OS", the latter would be the sensible business decision.
(disclaimer: my h/w knowledge is not vast, I picked SCSI as a widely-adopted standard for ultra fast HDs; if there's a better one, assume I said that instead)
but this would be great to use for mass storage, and get rid of those hard drives with moveable parts.
;o)
mmmm...solid state hard drives
First, I have to confess that I am a Materials Engineer and not some ubergeek with a CSE degree.
But it's a definite fact that technological advances are only made possible with the precedence of metallurgical advances.
Silicon wafers today wouldn't exist without the metallurgical backing to create high purity Silicon, Aluminum, and so on.
The point being that with the discovery of the buckey ball, we are entering a new age of history. We're not there, but we're working on it really hard.
Before you toss me out as flamebait consider that each primary age of human civilization is named as a metallurgical Age: Bronze, Iron, Steel. Some might argue that we are in the Silicon Age right now. However, the impact of Silicon is not as ubiquitious as the impact of the discovery of Bronze, Iron, or Steel.
But the Buckey Ball is going to be similar in the scope of impact as Steel or Iron. Why?
- Structural Materials
- Electronics
- Optics
- Aerospace
It's a FUNDAMENTALLY new material product available for the engineers to play with.So far everybody is missing the point including the Economist article. This stuff would replace SRAM. High performance FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera are made of SRAM with refresh in the neighborhood of ten nanoseconds. This would make vast and fast FPGAs possible.
So, instead of merely replacing system RAM or storage this would replace the CPU, the memory controllers, the video card, the sound card --it would be the ultimate SoC platform.
with this tech we can store the data in a place that is directly accesable by the CPU...no buffers, no caching, nothing!!!
just pop in the storage block and the CPU will access it faster than it does current ram.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
the memory manager and the part of the device manager than manages the hard drive will be one unit!!!
so to get full potential from this we will have to redesign our OSs otherwise if we stick it in the current system it will be a fraction of its potential.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Mark Brehob
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
If operating system and application developers didn't have to worry (much) about volatile RAM or slow disks anymore, it would radically change the kind of software that is needed (and possible.)
What sorts of applications can you envision for a handheld device with several TB of storage and a battery life of around 24 hours? Or a laptop with several hundred. Or a workgroup server with several thousand. What kind of new operating systems would we need? How could the average application developer begin to prepare for such a possibility?
I'm serious. I'd like to know what sorts of things would suddenly change, and what sould suddenly become possible, if this kind of tech was actually affordable in, say, 5 years.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
If this new ram were to be added on to current systems, it would likely be in the form of a PCI add-in card. That's still a bottleneck, but nowhere near as slow as using a bus spec for mechanical subsystems.
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--When components start getting this small, the chances of having an potential error occur go WAY up. What I'd be interested to see, is what they're doing to protect against stuff like cosmic-ray bit pollution and such.
--After all, if the scale is NANO, one cosmic ray or stray electro/magnetic field can potentially screw up a lot more percentage of memory... Massive redundancy, high speed and constant bit cross-checking would seem to be a reasonable requirement for these chips.
--For just one example, look what a few scratches can do to a CDR - or worse, a DVD. If you can't read it (use it reliably XMillion times) it's basically not very useful...
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
There are four parameters that contribute to the cost of standard semiconductors: the number of processing steps, die area (density), yield (the percentage of dies produced which is actually good), and packaging. The article implies that the density is extremely good, and packaging is presuambly standard stuff, so probably the main question is what kind of yield they can get.
I can see their theme song now...
Little Tubes, big adventures, Nan-nan-Nantero!!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
Enactment of Asimovs' three laws of robotics are what is needed, now!
Before our self-replicating AI creates nano tube DNA and evolves into replacements for Lawyers and Politician.
The evolution process will be accelerated by the fact that the earliest nano tube based life will be able to evolve at rates that the human mind cannot concieve.
If our religiuos view of armagedon is right then perhaps we are doomed to be eliminated by our own creation.
The New Tech Bible, Genesis 2.0 vs 1 Worship ye the NonoTech, for the Law is given by those chosen to replace thee.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I'm going to assume you don't mean encrypt the RAM before shutdown, since instead of doing that, you could just wipe it, which would be more secure and less trouble.
So you plan to encrypt and decrypt every word accessed in the memory? How do you plan to do that? Use a stream cipher? (e.g., RC4) You can't do that, because it's random access, meaning you can't just string data together as it comes in.
Use a block cipher? (AES, DES, etc.) Sorry, simple frequency analysis will crack that. And you can't use cipher block chaining or anything like that, because once again since data is randomly accessed.
Encryption is generally meant for stream data, not single blocks.
This is what Micro$oft is trying to do with the hardware encryption in the X-box and just as soon in Palladium as Bill can get the chip manufacturers to produce the needed hardware components. If the chip vendors are cool about it we could end up with a system that's open enough for GNU/Linux to use to secure the data it contains. Obviously they won't be able to read each others data or work the same way but if the standard is open and published I'm sure some ingenious kernel hacker will come up with a driver that allows for Ultra Secure GNU/Linux Server platforms. And lest we not forget the varios flavors of BSD, OpenVMS, etc..
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
I only hope those with the ability will design truly new software systems that will take complete advantage of the new physical systems, and not just apply old methods to it. Inefficient designs of old technologies applied to new technologies have a way of sticking around long after the loss of efficiency is apparent (qwerty layout of typewriters on computers, reversed number pads on keyboards and phones, - only two things to pop into my head at this hour). The parent post is correct in that CPU, sound card, video card, etc. can be replaced, but what are the possible paths of information to human interfaces? And what are other possible human interface designs? And what about the basics; does it still make sense to group binary into bytes of 8 bits? The possibilities are not just "thinking outside the box", it is realizing that you are no longer working with a "box" at all.
A fullerene is a certain class of carbon molecules that have a tubular or spherical form. The Buckminsterfullerene, or "buckyball" refers to the specific spherical C60 fullerine (shaped like a football). All other non spherical molecules (eg tubular) are just referred to as fullerenes.
Use a USB or firewire attached storage space for critical data. Attach the storage to user's belt so if they walk away from the machine they take the critical data with them.
I thought nanotube material was prohibitively expensive? Something like on the order of thousands of dollars per gram produced?
Winged Power Photography
If you want to save the state I guess you could encrypt it. But then I guess it'd be easier to save it to an encrypted disk, then wipe it.
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