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

Misleading Title

[eldavojohn]

Carbon nanotubes are about 200 times more sticky than the gecko's foot hairs, and their semiconducting nature is being exploited to make memory chips. To put it somewhat crudely, these work by slinging tiny mats of carbon nanotubes between lumps of silicon inside a chip to form very small bridge-like structures.

I didn't see any evidence in this article of the technology coming from inspection of Gecko feet. It appears that these "bucky tubes" where constructed and then someone said, "Oh, look, they're like setae!" I'm highly dubious that anyone studied Gecko feet and started to build silicon chips out of the tiny hairs.

This article could more aptly be titled, "New technology happens to reflect Gecko trait."

Great News!

[rAiNsT0rm]

...I just saved a bunch of money on my car ins...RAM Chips.

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.

Upcoming lizard related technology...

[Churla]

"Soft-tongue" - This will allow code to adaptively eat bugs in software. MS has been rumored to be in talks to buy this technology outright. Unfortunately it will also be unsightly enough to creep out your significant other. (which means it will fit in with most other MS software)

"Chameleo-browser" - A new plugin for firefox which will allow porn pages, when seen from a distance to blend in with spreadsheets and become unnoticable.

** Note - In response to these advances the LOST (Lizard Open Source Team) has chosen to patent their genetic makeup to prevent futher abuses of their technology. NTP will be handling the patents.

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