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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."
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?
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?
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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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.
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.
Nantero was earlier with it's nanotube-based mechanical NRAM. They have a nice movie explaining their technology.