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Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made
adamlazz writes "The most dense computer memory circuit ever fabricated, capable of storing around 2,000 words in a unit the size of a white blood cell, was unveiled by scientists in California. The team of experts at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who developed the 160-kilobit memory cell say it has a bit density of 100 gigabits per square centimeter, a new record. The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over."
[unveiling the most dense memory circuit ever made] ...?
Dr. Tufnel: Look... densest memory circuit ever, so dense you can't even see the data on it, so dense it's never been used.
Reporter: [points his finger] It's never been used
Dr. Tufnel: Don't touch it!
Reporter: We'll I wasn't going to touch it, I was just pointing at it.
Dr. Tufnel: Well... don't point! It can't be used.
Reporter: Don't point, okay. Can I look at it?
Dr. Tufnel: No, no. That's it, you've seen enough of that one.
I know DNA has been proposed as a storage mechanism before. Since the immense human genome fits inside a cell, wouldn't DNA offer much denser storage?
The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over."
Not in Microsoft Word format. Maybe ASCII.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Please post all "Libraries Of Congress" jokes in this thread. Help keep Slashdot clean. Thank you.
how many Libraries of Congress you can fit into an elephant with this technology.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Damn, none of my vague comparisons fit...
WAIT! How many angels can dance on it? That one is for small stuff, right?
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
I know DNA has been proposed as a storage mechanism before. Since the immense human genome fits inside a cell, wouldn't DNA offer much denser storage?
And have a stray biological virus get in and alter my computer's DNA-based memory?
I wouldn't want to think what the computer would use to alter its DNA-based memory fast enough to be useful, let alone what would happen if it escaped and latched onto an organism.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You know what I hate? Articles that show the scale of whatever they're talking about in obscure ways, like "size of a red blood cell" or "as long as eighteen schoolbuses lined end to end". Next time, just tell us the actual size and we can make that approximation ourselves!
d12
Rough comparison here. Short answer: DNA is far more dense information storage than this technology. Never mind that human white blood cells also contain the machinery to both compute and replicate data stored within DNA (as well as replicating the computation machinery).
Biology still wins. But nanotechnology creeps ever closer year by year...
However, 32 of them should be enough for anybody.
Why not just say "densest"?
- Is this volatile or non-volatile memory?
- What size word are they using?
- If non-volatile, what kind of endurance can be expected? What about data retention? It doesn't matter how small the memory is if the data only lasts 5 minutes. (Yes, I'm sure there would be applications even for that, but you get the point.)
- What are the write and read times?
- If volatile, does the data need to be refreshed continuously, or will it hold its value as long as power is applied?
- How much power is required for different operation?
Okay, so maybe I was expecting too much. But they could've at least given some of the most basic details, like word size (damned marketing dept!).The Yahoo! News article got the figures wrong. To get only 2,000 words (a computer term, not a linguistic one) out of 160-kbits they'd have to be 80-bit words. The article at Technology Review has better maths and more information to boot.
DNA replication has fault tolerance, DNA itself corrupts all the time. Hell, you store it twice in every cell and still have all these problems with integrity (of course that's a large part of what DNA is for, but for computer systems that part is irrelevant).
I just can't see biological systems ever achieving the kind of consistency we expect from computers. Do we really want to go to the good old days of running a computation several times and taking the average result as the answer?
sic transit gloria mundi
The piece on Yahoo! News was pretty low on details, so here's the abstract from the Nature paper:
A 160-kilobit molecular electronic memory patterned at 1011 bits per square centimetre
Jonathan E. Green1,4, Jang Wook Choi1,4, Akram Boukai1, Yuri Bunimovich1, Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin1,3, Erica DeIonno1, Yi Luo1,3, Bonnie A. Sheriff1, Ke Xu1, Young Shik Shin1, Hsian-Rong Tseng2,3, J. Fraser Stoddart2 and James R. Heath1
The primary metric for gauging progress in the various semiconductor integrated circuit technologies is the spacing, or pitch, between the most closely spaced wires within a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) circuit1. Modern DRAM circuits have 140 nm pitch wires and a memory cell size of 0.0408 mum2. Improving integrated circuit technology will require that these dimensions decrease over time. However, at present a large fraction of the patterning and materials requirements that we expect to need for the construction of new integrated circuit technologies in 2013 have 'no known solution'1. Promising ingredients for advances in integrated circuit technology are nanowires2, molecular electronics3 and defect-tolerant architectures4, as demonstrated by reports of single devices5, 6, 7 and small circuits8, 9. Methods of extending these approaches to large-scale, high-density circuitry are largely undeveloped. Here we describe a 160,000-bit molecular electronic memory circuit, fabricated at a density of 1011 bits cm-2 (pitch 33 nm; memory cell size 0.0011 mum2), that is, roughly analogous to the dimensions of a DRAM circuit1 projected to be available by 2020. A monolayer of bistable, [2]rotaxane molecules10 served as the data storage elements. Although the circuit has large numbers of defects, those defects could be readily identified through electronic testing and isolated using software coding. The working bits were then configured to form a fully functional random access memory circuit for storing and retrieving information.
Also, an interesting bit from the very end of the paper:
Many scientific and engineering challenges, such as device robustness, improved etching tools and improved switching speed, remain to be addressed before the type of crossbar memory described here can be practical. Nevertheless, this 160,000-bit molecular memory does indicate that at least some of the most challenging scientific issues associated with integrating nanowires, molecular materials, and defect-tolerant circuit architectures at extreme dimensions are solvable. Although it is unlikely that these digital circuits will scale to a density that is only limited by the size of the molecular switches, it should be possible to increase the bit density considerably over what is described here. Recent nano-imprinting results suggest that high-throughput manufacturing of these types of circuits may be possible29. Finally, these results provide a compelling demonstration of many of the nanotechnology concepts that were introduced by the Teramac supercomputer several years ago, albeit using a circuit that contained a significantly higher fraction of defective components than did the Teramac machine4.
3.1TB per platter, times probably four or five platters. You're looking at 12.4TB - most impressively, you "lose" more than a full terabyte due to the stupid *B/*iB capacity notation (down to 11.2TiB).
Still fairly impressive if you ask me. But, more importantly, memory circuit says "flash" to me (I can't be bothered to read TFA). That'll make for a very large stick, or a massive internal flash drive - the latter really appeals to me, as seek time can be a real killer and flash effectively doesn't have one.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Although the news writeup doesn't make this clear, the original scientific paper is comparing the data density achieved with RAM, not with hard disks. What they are doing is minituarizing high-speed volatile random-access memory. Although a 3 terabyte hard disk may not excite you, would you be impressed with 3 terabytes of RAM?
If we could increase the data-density of RAM by a few orders of magnitude (without sacrificing access times, of course), we could avoid one of the main bottlenecks in modern computers.
Really? Are you sure? What do you have between the third and the fifth then?
A guilty conscience means at least you've got one.
The Bush Administration says it can now represent the whole thing with a single "NOT" gate.
Don't accidentally swallow these things. Too many, and you might end up with the Library of Alexandiarrhea.