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NTT Develops Stamp-Size 1GB Hologram Memory
sandalwood writes "NTT has developed a new high-capacity memory storage device based on thin-film holography called Info-MICA. The official site is here but it's only in Japanese for now. According to the article, 'NTT is planning to bring the first commercial Info-MICA products to market in 2005 with a postage stamp-size ROM and a memory capacity of 1GB.' My first thought was that it would be perfect for a future handheld game device!"
Sounds great. Would also bee good for a take it with you OS like DSL(damns small linux).
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was that Apple would get its hands on that tech for a future iPod...
From TFA: "NTT will also continue its research and development of a writable media and drive configuration so that the Info-MICA storage method can be used for re-writable applications."
So yes, it is still in the ROM stage.
The unofficial
Dr. W.C. Minor will be really proud that his life's work can now be stored on a postage stamp sized ROM.
For those who don't know, Dr W.C. Minor provided thousands of entries to the Oxford Dictionary. He was a certified lunatic and did all his work from a mental assylum.
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This I don't understand. How can it be readable if it is uncopyable?
I have not RTFA but from what I've heard with holography (our brains is a good example) if you remove one piece you don't necessarily loose the information that it held you just distort the overall image.
Might this be applied to this for example?
Stories like this make me wonder, how much longer until it becomes common to buy PCs that come with a large bank of non-volatile memory instead of hard drives? The faster access time would be nice, but what I'd really be excited about is the dramatically reduced failure rate.
I recently had to send in my laptop to get the IBM 2.5" HD replaced (it was grinding slowly in oblivion), and luckily I was able to convince it keep running (a few "gentle" thumps on the table) long enough to burn some backup CDs.
I would love to have 30 GBs of flash memory to use instead of a comparatively huge unwieldly hard drive full of delicate moving parts. This would be great for laptops considering there'd be less heat produced, less energy consumed, less spaced used, and improved durability.
Maybe 5 years down the road we'll all have 1" thin laptops with low power comsumption that are both durable and powerful?
ce n'est pas un Sig.
what if you can buy an iPod that comes pre-loaded with an entire catalogue of music? or with one of those MICA card readers, so you can buy music catalogues on MICA cards and switch between them?
At one dollar per four megabytes of AAC audio, do you think people are really going to want to spend $250 extra paying the record labels for 25 good songs and 225 filler?
Take a Hologram (preferably on glass) and drop it about 6 feet to a hard floor. Yes, it shatters. Now pick up any piece of the hologram and look at it closely. While the data has lost some detail, the whole image is still recorded in each piece.
What happens if I take a hole punch to this thing? Do I still get the meaning if not the details? Heck, it probably can't be read at all!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
But even solid-state ROM replacement will be great. GPSs you don't have to load up with where you're going, car nav systems that don't freak out when you drive over a pot-hole, language translators with all the languages in them. All with decent battery life and upgradability.
High-density solid-state memory, along with improvements in battery technology, chip substrates, and the availability of ubiquitous wireless internet access, truly have the potential to create an all-new mobile computing revolution. The kind where after five or ten years, you ask yourself, "how was it that I lived without this stuff?"
Indeed we live in interesting times.
The article says media should be 100-200 yen, which is only about $1.00 - $1.85 USD. That should be an attractive price point for music megacorps to be looking at for the next big format. If we don't go the way of downloads, I can see that these postage stamp-sized things should work well for producing new releases on.
Toss in a little compression now that MP3/FLAC/AAC are getting mature and you've got enough to hold a double album of just about any music, and great for portable and car stereos.
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For years now we've been hearing about "holographic memory" as if its some sort of holy grail of information density. But this makes no sense: if there is a film that is high enough quality to record a hologram, that same film should be usable with a non-holographic format that has an even higher density (The computation of a digital hologram is lossy).
Now one possible advantage to holographic media is that it could be very robust to data loss, as the holography process distributes the data across the media. However, this feature is not even mention in the article.
But what this drive does is only display the pre-recorded hologram, it cannot generate or modify the data stored in the hologram.
It is much, much more diffucult to record such a hologram, in marketing wording:
CDs have been successful in the past without being recordable, maybe this media, too?
The movie or record industry will surely like a type of media that only can be created by specialized (and licensed?) fabs.
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You wouldn't neccesarily need 8 chips. I really doubt that they're at the absolute limit of how many layers per chip. It's the same thing as HD density. Pack in more layers, as long as you can focus your lasers onto them and you can greatly increase capacity. It would probably also be possible to fit multiple chips onto one card. So maybe 8 1gb chips on a card might be viable also.
As someone that works in a Clinical Pharmacy environment, all I can say is Yee Haa!. This would be fantastic for a Clinical Pharmacist or even a Doctor.
There are currently Drug Reaction and Information Databases (EMIMS, Clinical Pharmacology, etc...) available for Palm Pilots, but you have to keep swapping memory cards.
A really useful approach would be to have a large selection of these types of information databases available in one device - this would reduce the time required to support Doctors with decision making on Drug combinations to treat patients. And would also improve the quality of care the patients would recieve.
Another cool use in a Hospital environment would be (if the holographic memory was cheap enough) to hand a Doctor a Handheld Device that has just had all the medical information for every patient they are about to see on rounds - zapped into it. Including X-Rays, Ultra-sounds, and everthing else that is on file for the patients.
The increase in information at your figertips, combined with having Clinical Pharmacists on your rounds with all of their information - would result in a marked increase in the quality of care the patient recieves.
Very cool
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As soon as a writable version becomes a viable option, or mastering costs drop to affordable levels, I expect to see the NES, SNES, and Genesis "Every Game Ever in a single controller" pirate systems, rather than the current "99 virtually indistinguishable versions of 10 games, so we'll call it 999 games".
Heck, this would even make for an interesting portable Playstation format, should those ingenious HK pirates get the notion.
Of course, this brings up the matter (again) of having media too small to find, and there's not much room for a label. "See this? It's going to replace CDs soon. I'll have to buy the White Album again."
The only way I see this as being viable is if they embed it in a credit card sized card. Then, instead of going with the current postage stamp sized data block, they could do a square that takes up one end of the card, and have the unused end labeled. Pop it in a neat little jewel case type holder, and there you go.
Actually, this is starting to sound a little too much like isolinear chips...
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