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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.'"
The form of this device is 3-dimensional, with roughly one gig/centimeter. It's very unlikely that the storage size of these devices would be kept at one gig. More likely would be some convenient-to-cary size, or even a dynamic size with one side designated as the interface to the reader, and the opposite end would grow for increasing sizes. That means the reader would have to be built to hold the largest size that might go in it, else be open-ended, and a user will have to insert the data end into the device. There would also likely be a shell around the data unit to protect from blunt damage. This is all presumption, but at least mechanically, if this becomes popular, we could see the return of cartridge-style packaging of games. This combined with the return of the Atari brandname for some reason makes me uneasy. :^)
Ryan Fenton
It should be reasonably resistant to ESD, as the article states that the material was originally used as an anti-static coating.
"similar media seem enormous and clunky by comparison"
;-)
It depends on what you're calling "similar media". My 1gig Compact Flash card is probably less volume than a 1cm square cube already, and you can write AND read to it. Already a CF card is available at 4gigs in the same space.
It may be better form-factor than CD or DVD, but that's because these formats are quite old "standards". The CD format was developed about 20 years ago, right? DVD is looking pretty dated as well. I'm sure with newer technology (blue laser?) you could get up to 40gigs or more today.
I think this would be more impressive if it were a Terrabyte in the same space. The next big standard needs to make a big leap forward to get people to toss out the old technology. Of course, whoever is designing this standard will probably get a lot of heat from the big media lawyers to never sell it to end users (wouldn't want poor owner to backup all his DVD's to a single cube)
Of course the above CF cards are quite pricy, so it's not a great analogy, but the density argument is still valid.
First of all: I have no higher schooling in either of the subjects (chemistry or math), so if the answer to my question is explained somewhere in terms that a layman in those subjects could understand, by all means, direct me to them...
Anyway, here's what I'm wondering:
How far are we from reducing the problem of designing a material with the exact properties we need for a particular use, to entering the properties we want into a computer, watch the manufacturing machine mix together the required components, and the finished material come out?
I understand that much of chemistry is mathematics, and the ways that atoms and molecules interact can be predicted, simulated, to some extent, without the ingredients physically having to be mixed together.
Is it at all possible to determine if nature's rulebook of chemistry ever can be fully understood? Can it, given enough knowledge, time and computational power, be possible, in the future, to simulate how _any_ substances will interact, and without the need for experimenting, know in advance exactly what mix of atoms are needed to get the material properties we want? Or, closest possible match?
Depending on how cheap this memory is. You could pack in a few gigabytes. Being that your just storing phone numbers and text, that would be plenty of space. Thus, the phone would use the built-in memory like a scratch pad. when you want to erase a number, it just scratches off that address of memory as unusable and moves on to the next line. Chances are, that would never use up all that memory throughout the life of the phone. Being that technology advances and all.
Life is not for the lazy.
This also helps explain why OLED displays will replace LCDs later, rather than sooner: they haven't broken even on their LCD manufacturing investments yet. The only company really pushing OLED forward is Kodak (who also discovered it), both because they don't have anything sunk into LCD so there's nothing to canibalize, and because they've got to innovate now that film is dying (netcraft confirms it). :)
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Power to the Peaceful
Some of you people are missing the point. First of all, CDs/DVDs are optical, and the drives are mechanical with several moving parts. This is, for intents and purposes, solid state. These new drives are going to be a *ton* faster. Second. The end device will probably start off as cartridge, only much faster than CDs. Most cartridges from as far back as the Magnavox Oddysey^2 work fine to this day...If you even look at a DVD/CD wrong and you're in skipsville (at the minimum). DVDs aren't famous for being scratch resistant. So it's read only, so are DVDs/CDs. RWs are cool, yes. But the media is more expensive, and most people don't use them when you can buy spindles of blanks. I'm sure these will come in "burnable" form sooner or later too. Back to the solid state issue: future cartridge formats may take advantage of newer technology, and build them into the discs (no more new drives after this)
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Why don't storage companies fix DVDs first? CDs were originally promoted with 100 year archival lifetime. Now they're revealed to be more like 10, minus accidental scratches to the "label", the unprotected metal face into which the data is burned. DVDs are supposed to have 2 data faces, with 2 layers per face, at 4.7GB on each of the 4 layers (as per the DVD media spec). They still have just 4.7GB per disc, rather than 18.8GB.
If they glued 2 DVD-Rs together, and/or embedded the extra semitransparent layers in the clear acrylic, they'd double or quadruple the capacity to compete with current rewritable HD capaticies (per $ and m^3, if not per drive). And burying the fragile data layers would offer much longer archival lifetimes. And of course, they'd get to sell us a new line of incompatible drives! Bring it on!
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make install -not war
The device could be very small because it would not involve moving parts such as the laser and motor drive required by CDs.
From what a professor told me once, CDs didn't have to be created the way they are. They could've been made square so that, instead of the CD spinning in the tray, the laser beam would be bent by a prism (or through other means). This would make CD technology much faster and less susceptible to errors, etc.
Why did they make CDs round? Because they were first used for audio, so they were made to look like records. A silly marketing strategy screwed us out of a much better implementation of the same technology!
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Real memory is rewritable, like CD-RWs
They are actually working on something with the chalcogenide material used in CD-RWs. Its call OUM or Ovonic Unified Memory. Intel is supposedly ahead in the research on this stuff but STMicro and Lockheed Martin are in on it, too.
Google for it to get more info. The cool stuff is that, if this stuff comes to fruition, is that it will eventually replace hard drives - solid state storage with DRAM access speeds. *That* is the future. DISCLAIMER - Gordon Moore wrote a paper on this stuff in the 60s. So it really *is* the future.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.