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

Not a bad idea.

[DigiShaman]

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.

Re:No Problemo we'll send you a demo

[Saeger]

Why should a company flood the market when they're likely to overlap and kill off their own product line without ever selling anything.

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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Fix DVDs first

[Doc Ruby]

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!

CD technology

[Stile 65]

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!