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?

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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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.

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!