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Nanoscale Switches in Memory
Frans Faase writes "At the university of Boston, researchers are using nano-scale mechanical switches as a novel technology for building memory. These switches are extremely small, require only femtowatts of power to switch, but still can switch at speeds of 23.57 megahertz. And they are expected to become even smaller and faster and are expected to overcome the theoretical limit of 100 gigabits per square inch capacity for magnetic media."
You can pick these up at Radio Shack right?
100 gigabits per square inch capacity for magnetic media
.5" wide * 100 gig * ... Well maybe two tapes. And you thought no one was going to manufacture the T200 because the tape was dead - Ha I say; dont underestimate the power of...well you know.
One day my old vhs tapes could store all of my pr0n?
Let me see my old T160 at 1075 feet * 12" *
Good thing we can't hear it.
I don't care how fast they are, if they don't come in olive, then I don't want'em!
First a 30 year old OS is new again and now relay memory tehnology is the big thing! Wow!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Can drive a million of these things.
I wonder if this technology coluld be applied to making flying smart dust with silicon cilla?
...is that like a feminine type of energy?
How will these ever last as long as their electronic counterparts? If they are mechanical, they have moving parts, and moving parts wear out *much more quickly* than electronics without moving parts.
The tiny dimensions of the device allowed it to vibrate quickly, achieving a millions-of-cycles-per-second frequency of 23.57 megahertz. This speed reflects the rate at which the device could "read" stored information. As a comparison, the hard drives in current laptops can read at a speed of a few hundred kilohertz (thousands of cycles per second) in actual operation. The researchers speculate that even smaller beams could be produced and that such devices could achieve true read speeds in the gigahertz range -- billions of cycles per second.
I'm no electronics whiz, but if we can start making millions upon millions of devices that can resonate at higher frequencies, what possible interference will this cause with radio-communications?
Is there an electronics nerd/engineer on here that can clarify that for me?
So is this supposed to replacy my RAM or my hard disk? or both?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And I thought magnetic shielding was a problem before... Maybe the density of this type of memory will be offset by the shielding required to isolate it. Any thoughts?
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
Will be interesting to see if this could become commerical.
Throughout that article they keep talking about how amazing this technology is because it's so much better than hard drives. But they never compare it to regular DRAM or Flash memory, which is probably what it would compete with in the marketplace, unless it is much cheaper to manufacture than DRAM or Flash, which seems unlikely seeing as it's based on silicon fabrication techniques.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
These seem to be *very* low power devices. i would expect that you would have to be within inches to detect any radio interference.
eric
I went to a presentation given by an exec from Intel once. He talked about tiny mechanical switches. After the presentation a few professors in the EE and CE department raised their arms and questioned the idea. Among the points they brought up was that mechanical switches are unreliable. Sparks can fly and generate enough force to destroy the switches. It was precisely unreliability that lead to the invention of the transistor in the first place.
While the article mentions these switches being extremely robust, what have they done to address some of those older issues?
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sorry to nitpick but its "Boston University" not "the University of Boston"
BU Alum '84
I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a "University of Boston". Are they neighbors with Caltech University or Georgia Tech University perhaps?
Do editors even know what I'm talking about?
do the nano switches get bumped into some new position? I imagine a new wave of computer pranks, walking over to your friend's PC or nanoswitch memory card and giving it a good shake.
The warning label will read "keep away from mechanical paint mixers".
At the university of Boston
Its Boston University, my alma mater.
A new theoretical limit is sorely needed as I had almost thought of a way to exhaust the old limit.
It seems, to me anyways, that these devices would be aligned/manufactured/constructed in some sort of grid/lattice layout that could possibly create interference by amplification of wavelengths... if these devices are spaced an equal number of wavelengths apart, or some sort of fraction thereof, you'll get frequency amplification... conversely, you could create a subtraction effect by placing these things on opposite waves of the wavelength
(Excuse my poor explanation, IANAE)
BTW It doesn't look like one of these things would fare well if you dropped it.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
at the mechanical pong guy.....
100 gigabits per square inch capacity for magnetic media
What makes the transfer rate limit for magnetic media 100 gigabit/inch? Why this specific number? Does anyone know?
The idea of atom-by-atom construction was first put forth, in a scientific manner, over 40 years ago by Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988). In a speech given in December of 1959 entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," Feynman lauded the "...staggeringly small world that is below" (2). He challenged his fellow scientists to find ways by which to create manufacturing, storage, and retrieval systems that are as efficient as DNA and to contain such systems in a submicroscopic, self-contained unit the size of a cell. Feynman even offered an economic incentive to facilitate matters, several $1,000 prizes. Today prizes in Feynman's honor are awarded annually and biannually to scientists and students who think small. There are prizes for individuals and teams in theoretical and experimental categories and for achievements in nanotechnology (3).
Since Feynman's speech, things have been shrinking steadily. In the days when Feynman was a child, things were manufactured on the scale of one meter, which is approximately person size (4). At the time he gave his famous talk, technological accomplishments included vacuum tubes, which are measured on in millimeters (5). Currently, our lives are full of things that are built on a scale one thousand times smaller. Micrometers are the scale upon which today's computer components are measured (6). A thousand times smaller yet is "the scale where atoms become tangible objects" (7). This is the goal of nanotechnology, where the building of nanomachines will be realized.
The National Technology Initiative of the year 2000, which proposes funding $270 million worth of research, outlines goals that sound remarkably like an updated version of Feynman's forty-year-old speech. Using today's scientific jargon, the NNI proposes funding improved computers, bottom-up manufacturing of strong, lightweight, materials constructed out of inexhaustible resources, and nanoengineered, molecular sized medical cures (1). Bottom-up is the current technical term for building things the way in which biological systems do, "...at the molecular level, and in three dimensions" (8). Among other things, the NNI proclaims the government's intention to fund the development of technology that will allow the "shrinking the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube" (1). Forty years prior to the NNI, Feynman declared that it was entirely possible to put the "Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin" (2). Attaining the ability to compact vast amounts of information into a small area surely will revolutionize the dissemination of knowledge and have a profound impact upon industry. However, the potential effects of these compacting technologies upon biological systems have heretofore only been fully explored in the domain of science fiction.
I couldn't help but wonder if the story that became the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage had been inspired by Feynman's speech. In "Plenty of Room" Feynman mentioned that a friend suggested "although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon" (2). Perhaps the stated objective of the NNI to employ nanoengineered gene therapies, cancer detectors and drug delivery systems," may sound more creditable than swallowing your doctor. But put forth an equally serious manner, as the NNI, was Feynman's proposal that "... small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately-functioning organ" (2). And forty-plus years ago he offered a method by which to manufacture "such a tiny mechanism."
Feynman proposed first manufacturing a full-scale precision "master-slave hand" machine. The next step would be to use this machine to make a one-quarter sized model itself. Next, he suggested, using the smaller replica of the original machine, make tools that were small enough to make a replication of the "hands" that would again be reduced to one-quarter the size of its predecessor. He hypothesis that by continuing this shrinking proc
Enough holes in this story to drive several Beowulf clusters thru it: * They switch at 27Mhz do they? How many times can you flip a mechanical switch before it breaks? (About 0.1 seconds worth for most switches) * Ok, it takes no power somehow to hold the info. But what about reading/writing it? It's going to take not only power, but several transistors per bit. Good old DRAM nowdays is down to 1 well and one MOSFET per bit. ( plus row and column drivers). Can't even approach that with anything mechanical. * 27MHz is right in the middle of the old CB band! Watch out for truckers on your tail. * Volume goes down as the cube, surface area as the square of the linear dimensions. So these thingies are really at the whim of surface tension and surface electrostatic effects. The good part is they should be rather insensitive to mechanical shock. The bad part: watch out for static electricity, Hall Effect, and dust! * Sounds about as practical as bubble memory, string floppies, and 90-column oval-holed cards.
This reminds me of fuel injectors for cars. They are simply silicon valves that open and close hundreds of times per second depending on fuel needs. More info can be found at howstuffworks: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-injection3.htm One of the big problems of the auto industry is making engines burn fuel more efficiently. A lot of it has to do with how well the fuel and air mix before combusion. There may even be an application for this in car engines, if we replace single injectors with many thousands of little injectors. This would hopefully allow precise control of air/fuel mixtures which would reduce emissions, improve power, and improve engine efficiency. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, perhaps we could be looking at a new means of supplying fuel to your engine. There are a lot of steps between here and there, but there is still a good need for mechanical valves outside of the computer storage industries!
Magentic storage has an advantage of being extremely tolerant of physical shock. Mechanical switches such as this are not. Imagine a notebook drive with this technology where all the bits flip to 0 everytime you toss it into your backpack.
"It's as though a billion tiny switches cried out in terror and were suddenly flipped"
Nantero was earlier with it's nanotube-based mechanical NRAM. They have a nice movie explaining their technology.
If you guys have complained about stability, think about this. How many MILES does a hard disk platter "travel" in say, a year? let's see, 7200 revolutions per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours per day,... do you really think this is STABLE?
You drop it, it becomes unusable due to the precision required to align the HD heads and prevent collisions.
In contrast, MEMS (micro electro mecanical switches) only move back and forth. And only by NANOmeters. And we're talking about crystalline materials here (did you know that carbon nanotubes , for example, have a much greater endurance than diamonds? AND they're flexible).
Plus, nanoswitches, even when they can be "moved", have a limited and stable range of movement. And being non ferro-magnetic makes them immune to EM interference. If you flick a switch today, it requires exactly the same action in exactly the opposite direction to alter the information. But with a floppy disk... hey, just get it near to your stereo.
Of course, do you think scientists would be dumb enough not to add an "isolation" layer to deal with vibrations? But look, to alter these thingies we'd have to talk about vibrations in the megahertz scale.
So yes, in the future, I think these babies will be the replacement for flash memories and hard disks.
You only use 2% of your DNA
The effect they are using is a non linearity in the restoring force of a doubly clamped beam. It is well known that if you have a nonlinear restoring force F = kx + k_3 x^3, for sufficiently large driving power, the amplitude close to resonance becomes bistable. (This system is called a Duffing oscillator).
switching from one stable state to another is accomplished by driving the system at sufficiently high or low power, such that the bistability vanishes and the system is force into the high or low state. A simple hysteresis problem ...
For an example of a Duffing oscillator in a related system, look at figure 3 in this publication http://www.its.caltech.edu/~postma/pdf/APL83_1240. pdfAppl. Phys. Lett 83, 1240 (2003) (pdf file) ... yes, this is a shameless plug ;-)
Oops, I don't think you are referencing the right article. The article you point to is on "Nanodrive". It's essentially a scanning probe mircroscope (like an AFM), but with a large # of probes reading and writing simulataneously. It's an interesting device, but not the one discused here.
There is no University of Boston, there is a Boston University (which this article is about) and the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
How hard is it to note that bu.edu is short for Boston University?
Sorry for the nit pick, but this is not the "University of Boston" as the submitter wrote. I'm an alumnus, and it is "Boston University."
I think I'll stop here.
of course hard drives and solid state memory work so well under dusty, static-charged conditions! I think the biggest hurdle would be adopting a new technology into an well established mass commodities market. Maybe this stuff could find its way into BIOS? Good luck to them anyways.
"They are extremely robust," says Robert Badzey, a team member and graduate student in BU's Department of Physics. "Not only can these mechanical switches withstand radiation disturbances, like solar flares, they also are tough enough to work even after being dropped."
Oh great... That means when we do have a war with the machines that they'll be immune to EMP's and electrostatic attacks... So much for Zion.
Back to being serious, does this count as a Novelty? With computers that cannot be destroyed with EMP's we'll have to rewrite and discard allot of science fiction.