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IBM Develops Technology That Could Store Data In Atoms
InfoWorldMike passed us a link to a story at his site about a way to perform computer functions on the atomic level. IBM has pioneered the process at their Almaden Research lab in California. Essentially, researchers detect 'magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction'. Since the process allows the detection of the 'direction' individual atoms are facing, this is the first step towards the ones and zeroes used in binary. "In a second report, researchers at IBM's lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday's edition of the journal Science.The new technologies are at least 10 years from being used for components in commercial products, but the discoveries will allow scientists to take a large step forward in their quest to replace silicon, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon."
I read really crappy sci-fi one time where humans moved to more and more obscure and technical means to store data, untill eventually they were making notches in neutrons. Since the technology to read/write it was so expensive, they just centralized it. The machine broke and all the data needed to fix it was stored on a few atoms in a vault with no way to read it.
I know it is "dimestore" technology alarmist camp, but I thought it was funny that this story is comming true. Anyone know the name of this story??
I would think they'd have an automated process to spell check the titles so they could not care and not get well deserved rounds of criticism.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Some people may be confused by similar words:
developeer: a person who is a member of a non-hierarchical development group. in practice, some developeers are more equal than others.
develope: Related to an Antelope, but with Satanic horns. (The spelling is archaic)
developes: "The Envelopes" ("Da Evelopes") as spoken of by a Chicago native with a terrible case of the sniffles.
Actually, I read it as an IBM Dev Eloping with Technology...
Beetle B.
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I remember when Bubble memory was the next big thing.
We had 16K RAM and we liked it.
Yeah, that's the main reason. Binary is nice because you have the largest possible range between values, so the actual value drifting (0.8 is obviously 1, and 0.2 is obviously 0) doesn't cause much trouble.
Adding more states makes it much more likely that a 0 will turn into a 1, or a 1 might turn into a 2.
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From what it sounded to me, they were using the direction of the spin of the electrons to hold the information. There are only two directions, so that is why you only get binary. I suppose if you found a way to read the spin of each individual electron, you'd be able to store mulitple bits per atom. And yes, this is new (certainly for computers), as currently there are two types of RAM used most of the time: SRAM and DRAM.
SRAM uses only transistors to store the data. This takes several components, so it is very big and expensive, but also very fast. DRAM uses a capacitor to store the data and a transistor to select it. This only requires two components, but accessing the capacitor is slower and the capacitor slowly loses the charge, so it has to be refreshed within a certain amount of time, or the data it holds will be lost. Both of those require components which at minimum will be several atoms big, so creating a memory cell the size of an atom will most certainly reduce the size of RAM.
There is also trinary systems. This is probably what you where trying to get at. I have heard of RAM based on trinary, but I don't know if it is in use yet. I don't think it would work here as there are only two directions the electron spins. The trinary RAM I think is based on having the capacitor with either a positive voltage, negative voltage or no voltage across it. That is what gives the three possible states. With a capacitor, you could have more, but you'd have to use analog style circuits and probably higher refresh rates, which would mean higher failure rates and other problems.
That is a very simple explanation from what I know, and technically there are other types of RAM, but hopefully it gave you an idea what is going on.