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."

Comments

Re:25 DVDs?

[captain igor]

Yes, a terabit = 125 Gigabytes, which is 31.25 DVDs

Hmm

[pHatidic]

These arrays can record up to one trillion bits of data -- known as a terabit -- in a single square inch.

Is that a hardware terabit or a software terabit?

Re:Hmm

[DrEldarion]

Or, if they're rounding, is it a tibibit?

Re:25 DVDs?

[chris-johnson]

And of course after I post, I see terabit instead of terabyte.

What about speed?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

This kind of devices would be incredible for backup purposes, but also, the recording method seems to be also fast, would they accept allmost-unlimited rewrites?, in that case, this technology could finally replace magnetic devices. Solid state is allways better, but so far, the existing alternatives don't offer the durability and flexibility of hard disks.

Re:25 DVDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Terabit is 125GB. Single layer dvd discs store 4.7GB while dual layer discs store 8.5GB.

25 DVDs is a really bad comparison since the size of a dvd could vary.

Go ahead

[killa62]

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.

Re:Go ahead

[bohnsack]

1 trillion bits is 125 GB, whether you're a hard drive manufacturer or not, as "G" is exactly defined as 10^9. If you're interested in representing this quantity in terms of multiples of 2^(30), as in your 116, 1 trillion bits is more correctly stated as 116.5 GiB, 116.5 gigabinary bytes, or 116.5 gibibytes. See the SI spec on prefixes for binary multiples for more information.

Re:Go ahead

[bohnsack]

It's not a question of the giga part, everyone knows the metric system by now (I hope)

Really, do you? Last time I looked, G or giga is defined as exactly 10^9 (1,000,000,000).

Here's the important part you were ignoring:
---
Hard drive manufacturer: One GigaByte = 1000 bytes

Wrong. Hard drive manufacturers and everyone else who knows how to use SI prefixes correctly knows that one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Software/everyone else: One GigaByte = 1024 bytes

Wrong again. If in this case you mean 2^30 bytes, 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. What about network people? To them, 1 GB is certainly 1,000,000,000 bytes. Does a 100 Mb/s Ethernet operate at 1,000,000 bits per second (10^6) or is is 1,048,576 (2^20)? More and more people are becoming aware of this issue and moving from the old ambiguous use of prefixes representing powers of ten to represent powers of two to the new more percise and seperate binary SI prefixes. Case in point. Bittorent. Download the client, use it, and you'll notice that bytes, in binary multiples are correctly refered to as KiB, MiB, etc.

If you had actually read the link I posted on SI prefixes for binary multiples, you might know the following historical context:

Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.

In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission.

Postage Stamp Storage

[cybercobra]

Cool, the next time I need to send something over sneakernet to someone far away, I'll just send a postcard with 2 stamps on it. 1 postal and 1 storage stamp.

Re:Magnetic memory = Doom

[Canadian_Daemon]

So, you are writing you 10 000 line program, get half way through it today, save to your non persistent memory, shutdown for the night, and what? You really ought to think about it for a while, how often do you use your harddrive? Never, well then you are correct in your idea that persistent memory is a bad idea. However, if you are like any person in the world that boots their OS from a hard drive, or saves their work to a hard drive, or plays games, then you probably want persistent memory

More information

[ploss]

More information about the company can be found at their website, http://www.nanochip.com.nyud.net:8090[Coral Cache Link].

Re:Magnetic memory = Doom

[GerbilSoft]

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`.

Re:How long.

[Spy Hunter]

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.

Re:25 DVDs?

[XorNand]

DVD-R / DVD+R capacities are 4.7GB. However, actual pressed, dual-layer DVDs are 8.54GB (single-sided). So the analogy is a bit incomplete. A better analogy, of course, is how many hogshead of LoC does it hold?

impressive

[Hellasboy]

i'm impressed... 25 dvds for 1 terabit. but i think were all holding out until we hit 150 zip disks on a square centimeter or 172 ls-120's on the size of a heineken bottle cap.

Re:impressive

[Punboy]

Free Terabit of Heinie with your Heineken! ...Thats Free Porn.

Issues untold yet

[karvind]

(a) Reliability: No words about how reliable the system and elements are. It is one thing to make a 1M by 1M array and another to make bigger. Silicon semiconductor industry is lot more mature in transferring electronic processes. MEMS process still have low yield and haven't found commercial success yet (except the accelerometers used in air bags etc).

(b) Testing: How are they going to test this trillion element chip ? Testing complexity grows exponential with number of elements and it will require serious consideration. It may be worthwhile to make smaller components which can be tested easily (modern chips has one-third cost devoted to testing)

(c) Redundancy: Is this process going to give more yield than conventional electronic processes ? If no, common technique of redundancy has to be utilized. This brings in the cost in terms of power, speed and delay. For example if the yield is only 90%, that means you will need ~110% resources. Not only you have to make up for the defective components, you will have to provide lot more redundancy for testing. At some point it becomes worthless as the performance will drop to floor.

But still it is a good work and perhaps will generate some new ideas.

Re:Issues untold yet

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

(a) Reliability: No words about how reliable the system and elements are ...
(b) Testing: How are they going to test this trillion element chip ? ...
(c) Redundancy: Is this process going to give more yield than conventional electronic processes ?

Do you understand the definition of a prototype?

I'm sure all your questions will be answered in due time, in 5 or 10 years when the device hits the street.

Re:Issues untold yet

[karvind]

I don't want to flame you, but I would take a scientific/engineering approach rather than accepting opinion from a wall-street magazine. It would be worthwhile to follow the bubble burst of the MEMS technology in the recent 4-5 years. Even after 10 years of work, MEMS elements have serious issues in packaging. Intel withdrew their MEMS program as it doesn't have enough yield. So just making prototype is not the end of the story.

As an engineer you have to take things with a pinch of salt. Every scientific idea may not be technologically feasible. In the end economics determine if the product will even hit the market or not. Nanotechnology is not cheap, so it is worthwhile consideration to see if it is even possible to tackle the important issues rather than hoping someone else will do it.

ATM or AFM?

[fermion]

From the article it is hard to tell what they are taking about. IBM used an atomic tunnelling microscope, a reltively complicated piece of equipment that relies on the fact that quantum particles can tunnel through a potential, to move that atoms. The ATM can either be used to create a atomic scale picture of a surface, or move atoms. An atomic force microscope is simply a physical hammer that gently taps a surface and through the change in deflection creates an image. The tip on an ATM is currently so fragile I don't think it could be used to move atoms. The lifetime of a tip is pretty short just becuase of wear, and their is not way to reliable create good tips.

So we must assume they are talking about an ATM, which a largish and complicated peice of equipment. It requires a piezoelctric device to move the tip to the proper placed on the substrate. For years, such devics kept cell phones large. The ATM requires a highly senstive feeback loop to keep the current constant. And is still requires a very delicae tip that can be easily damaged. Durable tips are probably years away and involve carbon nanotubes. Tips that have a lifetime more than a few months are probably even longer away.

It is a neat idea and probably works well in the laboratory on a vibration cancelation table. How would it work on a portable in the train or in the car? Does anyone have any real details on the technology?

Re:ATM or AFM?

[notmuchtosay]

As someone already mentioned i think the ATM you refer to is usually called a STM (scanning tunnelling microscope). However an AFM does not need to operate in contact (hammering) mode. There are other techniques called non-contact/lift mode. In these mode you don't sense the repulsion from the surface. You actually drive the tip near resonance and then sense the change in frequency as the tip is pulled toward the surface.

Checksums

[LaCosaNostradamus]

25 DVDs on a chip the size of a postage stamp

Well, not with the software overhead in various checksums that will be had in 2010:

• MPAA/RIAA field (the "copy checksum")
• Dept. of Homeland Security header (the "red checksum")
• UN Standards bit (the "blue checksum")
• .SUM (the "Microsoft checksum")

Those are apt to take up quite a bit of space. So maybe you'll get 15 DVDs (maybe 20 by paying Microsoft an expansion fee) on that postage stamp.

Re:Checksums

[mrgsd]

With each checksum containing an "Evil Bit" (or are they all evil?)

And thats just 2-dimensional

[mnmn]

Some earlier stories were mentioning stacking layers of memory to increase it. So considering structural, voltage, data and addressing layers as well, how much data can we store in a 1 inch cube?

Whatever that number, we'll still be running out of space since Windows 2050 will take 1/3rd of that space and games+movies the remaining 2/3rd.

Fastest Transfer Rate

[ryanmfw]

So, if we attached a couple square inches of this stuff to a pigeon, or filled a 747 with some of these chips, and flew it around the world, how fast would the transfer rate be?

Re:Fastest Transfer Rate

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

So, if we attached a couple square inches of this stuff to a pigeon, or filled a 747 with some of these chips, and flew it around the world, how fast would the transfer rate be?

I know you're trying to be funny but...

What most people really look for in electronic communication networks is not transfer rate but good latency: if I can "download" the entire library of Congress by having it Fedexed to be in a big box full of disks, but I have to wait 3 weeks for the snail mail request to reach the LoC, the guys to package everything up and the box to reach me eventually, I may be better off downloading the LoC on a slower link that answers immediately.

Re:Fastest Transfer Rate

[Dark Lord Seth]

African or European pigeon?

Don't hold out for them

[iammaxus]

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.

I'd be really surprised if we see this technology on the shelf in anything close to 5 years from now.

Re:25 DVDs?

[kyouteki]

Except, of course, nobody said anything about terabytes, or even terrabytes.

Google

[blcknight]

http://www.google.com/search?q=1+terabit+in+gigaby tes 1 terabit is 128 gigabytes. That is the definitive answer from google. It's not 116, not 125.

What happened to Millipede?

[DaleBob]

There was an article written (I believe by researchers from IBM) in Scientific American about two years ago regarding Millipede that said they expected technology to come to market in 3 years. Now the article from the post suggests the project is all but dead. What happened? I'm too lazy to actually look at the patents, but it isn't clear at all how this new technology actually differs from Millipede. I'd guess the write and erase mechanisms are different.

A square inch!

[NaruVonWilkins]

My god, it's two dimensional! Our memory limitations are over!

Re:Magnetic memory = Doom

[david.given]

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.)

Standard DRAM will maintain its state --- mostly --- for a remarkably long time without refreshing. Unfortunately, it doesn't do so in a useful state.

I once was working on an embedded device that had VGA out. The development cycle was power on, boot from TFTP, run system, wait until it crashed, power off, repeat. When the system switched on, one of the first things the boot loader did was to initialise the video chipset, but without clearing the video memory.

If the board had been off for less than about five minutes, you could still see the last display that had been there when the board crashed.

Without refreshes, the data would gradually fade; the image was always corrupted with snow. The longer you left it switched off for, the worse the snow got. Different RAM chips lasted different lengths of time --- there was one band across the middle that would become completely unintelligable in about 30s, while another one could hold an image for about two minutes.

I suppose you could use this to store data for short periods during a power down, but you'd have to use so much redundancy to ensure that the data would survive the inevitable corruption that it probably wouldn't be worth it, but I'm sure someone, somewhere, could come up with a Nifty Trick(TM)... You couldn't do it at all on PCs, of course --- on boot, they wipe all their RAM, video or otherwise.

Such products are a godsend

[danila]

It's amazing how lucky these chip manufacturers are. Imagine to what lengths people need to go in other industries in order to convince customers to upgrade. If all you are selling is a damn chocolate bar, there is only so much that you can do to improve it. They had perfectly edible chocolate bars 100 years ago and there isn't much besides slapping "10% free" on the package that you can do. Ditto for things like headphones, ballpoint pens and pretty much everything else.

But the manufacturers of memory chips, hard disks, even CPUs, have it really easy. All they need to do is solve the technological problem of doubling the capacity/performance and the customer is eager to shell out some $$$ to get the new version. No focus groups are needed, no expensive marketing surveys. The only thing you need to do to please the customer is basically improve the obvious performance metric by 100%. You don't need to lie and twist the facts as those guys in cosmetics do with "73% more volume" for your eyelashes or "54% healthier hair" bullshit. You just make your CPU twice as fast and that flash chip twice as large, and you are done.

And if you really want to, you can say it will make Internet faster, or something...

AFM

[DaleBob]

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.

OK! ENOUGH BULLSHIT NUMBERS!!!

[__aailob1448]

We don't measure HDs in Terabits . 1 Tbit = 128 GBytes or 128 gigs3

Second, converting this from inches to Centimeters, we get slightly less than 20GB/cm^2

Yes ladies and gentlemen, 20 Gigs per Squared centimeters.

That's a nice increase but it sure as hell isn't overwhelming.

Assuming a radius of 5 cm for a 3.5" HD, we get a surface of 80 cm^2 per platter. That comes to 800 Gb per platter. around 8 times the current density.

These new-gen HDs will be at most 8 times bigger than those we have right now.

That's it. 8 times. Not even a single order of magnitude.

Now mod this up or be destroyed!

Re:OK! ENOUGH BULLSHIT NUMBERS!!!

[dbIII]

We don't measure HDs in Terabits

It's a business journal - and you can tell. We don't measure size in molecules either - it's a long way from H2 to a really big polymer chain - or since molecules don't make sense where crystals are involved, a single crystal of silicon they cut the wafers from, a jet turbine blade or a cubic galena crystal the size of a house.

They should stick to their standard business journal units - football feilds - if the ewant to be vague.

8 times. Not even a single order of magnitude.

Think of the readership. A response from some would be "IBM can only increase it by two orders of magnitude by these guys can increase it 8 times! Buy! Buy! Buy!

We need better teaching of basic mathematics in high schools so the guy whose dad owns the company still picks up a clue along the way. Either my country has become a dumping ground for the worst of US management or the USA is really in trouble.

Re:OK! ENOUGH BULLSHIT NUMBERS!!!

[NaruVonWilkins]

Actually, it matters a lot whether it's a chip or a platter. A platter requires, in today's hard disk drives, a set of support mechanisms equal to much more than 100% of the platter. A chip of equal storage density per square inch as a platter will take up less space, require less overhead, and generate less heat. The comparison I'd like to see is to today's solid state storage devices - USB drives, CompactFlash, etc. I'm pointing out that this is being compared to a technology it will not significantly affect the development of (except, perhaps, in cache).

What size is the prototype?

[spworley]

The article says they have working prototypes. Of what? The implication is that it's a device that's a square inch in size, and it holds a terabit of data. But from the usage of "square inch" I think the reality may mean a density of 1 terabit per square inch, not that they have a terabit device. (I hope I'm wrong!). For example, they may have a prototype that stores 1000 bits in an area of a billionth of a square inch. That's a lot different than an actual terabit device! I wish articles had more details...

At the end of my nose...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...there is a single atom. Orbiting it is an electron. When it's in a spin up state I consider it to contain a 1. When spin down it's a zero. There: a prototype of a multi exaterapetabit/mm^3 storage device at the end of my nose. Oh wait - I might be able to hype this up more. Oh yes...it's an electron, so it's in a superposition state. It's a multi exapetaterabyte/mm^3 quantum computer at the end of my nose. Surely /. have got to publish this story now.

What's with Nantero??

[luwain]

Prototype Arrays of Atomic Force Probes?? Is this real technology? I wonder is the talk of a real product by 2007 is credible, or just marketing to attract venture capital. I'm still waiting for products based on NRAM (made up of arrays of carbon nantubes) from Nantero (nantero.com). I wonder if "atomic force probes" are easier to manufacture than "arrays of carbon nanotubes"? Will Nanochip beat Nantero to the marketplace, or will they just burn through venture capital and next year we'll hear about another "Nano-'something'" company with some other "revolutionary technology" that's going to produce a marketable product "real soon now".

Re:Magnetic memory = Doom

[orangesquid]

That's because a 20Gig drive usually has something like 22-24Gigs of space; the extra space is used to relocate bad blocks.

If you completely overwrite a bad block, the drive's firmware is usually smart enough to move it to a new place. Reading from a bad block until you manage to get (most of) the data, and then re-writing it, will sometimes work (due to the same mechanism).

I'm told some drives are smart enough to try to "fix" bad blocks without being forced to like this, but I don't know of any (mostly likely because there would be no way to tell, since it would be user-transparent).

Occasionally, a drive will have some sort of mechanical shock which will damage a portion of the disk; often, the disk is not "failing," but has simply become partly damaged. A true "failing" disk would mean that the disk material was corroding, or that a poorly designed drive was losing its own low-level formatting from the motor's magnetic fields (I doubt that would ever happen, though), or something pretty ugly like that.

(I don't know if what I've said is completely true; please correct me if I'm talking out of my ass. It's been a long time since I've looked this up.)

Yeah, but ...

[elronxenu]

They didn't explain how many volkswagons per metric second.

This is a true magnetic method

[jkocurek]

Other wise it is similar to Millipede. To increase density, they can move the R/W heads and the media. I've been following this for a while, I have exchanged e-mails with Tom Rust starting back in 1998. Like with fusion, it seems that this has been just a year or two from commercialization ever since...

They have had working prototypes for a long while. I suspect that the problems have more to do with reliably getting it into production.

Re:Magnetic memory = Doom

[Coolpup]

If you RTFA you will see they are talking about FLASH MEMORY. I've never seen anyone use their flash drives as their RAM. Do you know why this is? Because flash memory is far to slow to be used as RAM.

data transfer rate

[kebes]

Most posters seem unimpressed with the storage density they are reporting, but I'd like to point out a couple of things. (Note that I use atomic force microscopes in my "job" -- I do academic research.)

Firstly, the storage density they are reporting is for a prototype setup, and it's already as good as curent HD technology. The exciting thing is not the value they currently have, but rather the fact that this technology can be pushed very very far. Thus, comparing this new technology to a mature technology (magnetic disks) is not really fair. I do believe that if this new technology is investigated for 10 years, it could outperform magnetic drivers in terms of storage density.

Secondly, the data transfer rate can be much higher with this new technology. The millipede project uses an array of thousands of AFM-like tips, which means that in principle 1000 bits of data are read at a time (compared to, for example, 4 bits read at one time in a magnetic disk drive with 4 platters). We all know that HD access is a major bottleneck in modern computers. This new concept could immediately speed that up by 2 orders of magnitude. I think that's worthy of consideration!

That having been said: don't hold your breath. MEMS is a rapidly evolving field, but it will be awhile before it can really beat out the mature magnetic technology. The article also doesn't give any details on how this new technology works. The potential is great, but alot of work has to be done.

Overheard at IBM...

[isny]

Boss: What are you two working on? You've been sitting and staring at the screen for hours.
Engineer 1: Uh....the millipede project.
Engineer 2: Yeah. Lots of data stored in two dimensional space.
Boss: Great! Keep up the good work. (Leaves)
Engineer 1: Whew that was close.
Engineer 2: In more ways than one. Look out! Here comes the spider again...
Engineer 1: I love MAME.

bytes, bits, nibbles blah!!!

[falser]

Why can't people just standardize on a common unit of measurement such the number of Encyclopedia Brittanica's or the number of Library of Congress's?

40 bits on the address bus...

[carlmenezes]

Kinda gives you an idea of how huge a 64 bit address space is. I mean, 116GB is still 24 bits smaller - by about 16 million times (10 bits = 1K, 24=10+10+4) - than the amount of data 64 bits can address.

Could this be an indication of the data volumes we will be dealing with in the future when 32 bit computing on the deskop is obsolete?