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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?
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
At that speed, they probably only come in red shift. Or blue shift. It depends on if you are reading or writing data ...
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?" `":" #");}
femtowatt is one quadrillionth (10 ^ -15) of Watt
"Wearing out" usually involves microscopic particles getting rubbed off of the mechanical parts by friction. Each of these switches is probably smaller than any particle shedded by normal wear-and-tear, and also smaller than the surface features that the whole concept of friction is based on. That may give them essentially unlimited life, or at least lifetime comparable to solid state electronics (which can suffer some "wear" from atomic migration in the crystal lattice).
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.