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

The Writer of TFA clearly doesn't know much

[SpeakerToManagers]

He says breezily,

Although they don't occur naturally, they have similar properties to setae ...

The first part of that sentence is absolutely false, since buckytubes are found in large quantities in ordinary soot, for instance from candles. The only reason we can't just burn candles to make our RAM chips is that there are a lot of different kinds of tube in the soot: single-walled tubes of different chirali ties, multi-walled (concentric) tubes with different numbers of tubes nested within, and various pieces of partially-closed carbon sheets. Buckytubes interesting properties are largely the result of having tubes of a single, known, type, so soot isn't terribly useful by itself. The second part of the sentence is true, but not terribly important, since almost any nanostructure with long, thin parts would exhibit significant van der Waals force when brought in contact with a surface. That's how an atomic force microscope works. I'd say the author is dependent on press releases for everything in the article, and so I wouldn't trust anything he had to say very much, especially the statement that we'll see commercial chips this year. Speaker

Re:Shipping this year?

[Alsee]

How many read-write cycles can these things do?

I admit I'm just speculating here, but most sorts of application carbon nanotubes are damn-near indestructible. Admittedly this operation involves physical bending and flopping back and forth and would normally rais issues on mechanical wear and tear, but nanotubes are single molecules. A single molecule does not "wear and tear". I don't think these would have any meaningfull read-write cycle issues like Flash memory has.

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