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Nano-Scale Memory Fits A Terabit On A Square Inch
prostoalex writes "San Jose Business Journal talks about Nanochip, a company that's developing molecular-scale memory: "Nanochip has developed prototype arrays of atomic-force probes, tiny instruments used to read and write information at the molecular level. These arrays can record up to one trillion bits of data -- known as a terabit -- in a single square inch. That's the storage density that magnetic hard disk drive makers hope to achieve by 2010. It's roughly equivalent to putting the contents of 25 DVDs on a chip the size of a postage stamp." The story also mentions Millipede project from IBM, where scientists are trying to build nano-scale memory that relies on micromechanical components."
Mod me -1 redundant if you like, but for people out there, but 1 trillion b= 125,000,000,000 bytes = 116 GB, or if you're a harddrive manufacturer, its 125 GB.
More information about the company can be found at their website, http://www.nanochip.com.nyud.net:8090[Coral Cache Link].
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
Warm reboots don't erase memory. Cold reboots usually don't erase memory, either. (There are still fragments of what was left before after doing a cold boot.)
And as almost all data recovery people know, reformatting a hard drive using the conventional disk formatting commands don't really erase anything; they merely create new directory structures. In order to really erase a disk, you have to use something like Eraser or `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda`.
It is non-volatile by nature. But it is not likely to be fast enough to replace RAM. Instead it could replace Flash memory or even (depending on cost) hard drives. The real question is, how long until it's practical to manufacture and use in mass-produced products? The answer seems to be (according to the article) 2007-2010 timeframe.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The IBM Millipede project doesn't use tunneling microscope technology (ATM, or usually STM). It uses a modified AFM tip that can be resistively heated. The hot tip pushes into a polymer surface and creates a hole. The hole can be "erased" by heating close to the surface and the region around the hole melts and fills it in. The reading is done with cold tips using regular AFM technology.