Gecko's Feet Power New RAM Chips

An anonymous reader writes "IT Week has a story about carbon nanotubes being used to make memory chips. As the name suggests, carbon nanotubes are extremely small cylinders of carbon, and they have some similar properties to the extremely fine hairs on the feet of Geckos that enable the lizards to climb walls and hang from ceilings. The new chips work faster than current technologies, and hold their data without needing a power source." We've previously discussed this technology.

Comments

Shipping this year?

[insert cool name]

According to TFA they'll be shipping "later this year".

This seems somewhat unlikely, but would be cool if it was true. High speed USB pendrive anyone?

Little short on technical detail though. How many read-write cycles can these things do?

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http://www.jarfinder.com/

Re:Shipping this year?

[BigDumbAnimal]

You will still be limited by the bus speed. In my experience, I've never gotten more than around 20MB/sec from USB2.0 or Firewire (1394a). That 480Mbps (60MBps) that USB 2.0 claims is a pipe dream.

Not informative

[karvind]

TFA is completely useless, it is generic wall_street_please_all kind of tone without any technical details. And the article linked in the main story (Y-shaped nanotubes) has nothing to do with Nantero.

We had been covering Nantero for a long time on slashdot:

Carbon Nanotube Memory on the Way

Nanotube Non-Volatile Memory Entering Production

Nanotube Applications Grow And Grow (mentions about NVRAM)

Buckminsterfullerene Strikes Again - Nanotube RAM

NOT a Misleading Title

[G4from128k]

If you RTFA, you'll see that the "gecko phenomenon" is the basis for the device's retention of memory when the power is off. The bits are encoded by whether the tubules are erect (open circuit) or bent-over and touching the substrate (closed circuit). When the power is removed, the same van der Waals forces that underpin gecko toes keeps the fiber in the down position.