HP, Princeton Develop New Memory Material

An anonymous reader writes "Hewlett-Packard and Princeton researchers say they've developed a hybrid material that could be used for super-compact electronic memory, making the CD, DVD and similar media seem enormous and clunky by comparison. As reported by Science Blog, 'The researchers achieved the result by discovering a previously unrecognized property of a commonly used conductive polymer plastic coating. Their memory device combines this polymer, which is inexpensive and easy to produce, with very thin-film, silicon-based electronics.'"

Comments

Like the Batteries

[GaelenBurns]

This is another thing that strikes me as being similiar to the battery "advances" we've had over the years that have never made it into consumer products. We've been hearing about MRAM and storage densities for years, and yet we still don't have instant-on computers. I wonder if we'll see an article about how these advances are idling just like the battery field.

Write once doesn't mean it's not an advance...

[twiggy]

You know, it's not like just because it's "write once read many", it's useless.

Imagine a new CD or DVD format where the media doesn't have to be spun. Portable music / video players could be nearly solid-state and thus more durable and compact and require far less maintenance.

I'd happily move to a new format of music where I could carry something like a pack of gum filled with "sticks" of music and pop one into a tiny player even smaller than that of the iPod....

Furthermore, this sort of thing is great for archiving data, which is the main purpose anyone talked about in the article. More data archived in less space = good, period... it takes up less bookshelves or whatever...

My only concern is that with the "fuse" design, how susceptible is it to be ruined by an errant static shock, etc?

Re:doesn't sound so great

[OzPhIsH]

A dvd doesn't fit in my pocket because it has much to large surface area. Fold it in half, and you'd have the same volume, but much smaller surface area, and a much easier time fitting it in your pocket. Similarly, a pack of cigarettes has more volume than a dvd or cd, and less outer surface area. It fits conviently in your pocket. You can have any volume you want, as small as you wanted, but the possibility exists to span that volume out over an infinate amount of surface area. Granted, a decreased volume of an ideal solid is going to decrease size and surface area of the object, but we could actually increase the volume and make theat object "smaller" by moving away from the flat disc shape DVDs and CDs use, towards a more ideal shape like a sphere, or more practically in this case, a cube or set of cubes.