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Researchers Create Graphite Memory 10 Atoms Thick

Posted by timothy on from the comes-with-convenient-pink-rectangular-prism dept.

CWmike writes "Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick. The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate. 'Though we grow it from the vapor phase, this material [graphene] is just like graphite in a pencil. You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper. If you were to place Scotch tape over it and pull up, you can sometimes pull up as small as one sheet of graphene. It is a little under 1 nanometer thick,' Professor James Tour said."

52 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Pessimists? by Warll · · Score: 5, Funny

    As an optimist myself I would have said that it was 10 atoms thin!

    1. Re:Pessimists? by aztracker1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I was told thicker is better... ;)

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    2. Re:Pessimists? by NerdyLove · · Score: 2, Funny

      More to love :-)

    3. Re:Pessimists? by Mozk · · Score: 5, Funny

      When cornered into a room by ninjas with nothing separating you from them but a door of wood, yes, thicker is better, but you will die regardless.

      --
      No existe.
    4. Re:Pessimists? by Myrddin+Wyllt · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm not sure thicker is better. I remember hearing that churches in northern England replaced their super-thick oak doors with thinner planks riveted together in a cross-ply design, as this provided better protection against the axes of marauding Vikings.

      Of course, Ninjas are a different proposition, and five minutes googling gives me no citation for the monastic plywood theory, so perhaps direct experiment is the only way to settle this one - just make sure you have plenty of emergency Pirates on hand for back-up and it should be safe enough.

      --
      [ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
  2. Finally.. by jmerlin · · Score: 3, Funny

    I store data using just a pencil, paper, and some tape. I knew there was a way. Oh wait...

    1. Re:Finally.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Compression.

      You fold the paper in half, and then tape the ends. Voila! Same information, half the size!

    2. Re:Finally.. by Todd+Fisher · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah but you can only do that 8 times. Pfft some technology!

      --


      --I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
    3. Re:Finally.. by vux984 · · Score: 3, Funny

      (Also, about 37 foldings of it would make the paper so high to reach the moon).

      No problem. Just bend the resulting column in half 37 times.

      ONCE AND FOR ALL!

    4. Re:Finally.. by volsung · · Score: 2, Informative

      Almost. That should be $width_of_paper * 2**37.

    5. Re:Finally.. by ecalkin · · Score: 5, Informative

      you should watch some mythbusters!

      i think they managed 12 or 13 folds.

      of course they started with a sheet of paper the size of a house and made the last fold with the help of heavy machinery!

      eric

    6. Re:Finally.. by setagllib · · Score: 3, Funny

      Every time you use an unspecified unit as the base in an exponential function, baby Newton cries.

      --
      Sam ty sig.
    7. Re:Finally.. by hvm2hvm · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, the huge thin sheet only got to 8 and they needed a forklift to fold it. 12 folds would take an extremely large (or very thin) sheet of paper. That's because folds make the paper exponentially thicker and smaller. So, for the same thickness for each new fold you need to make the paper 2 times exponentially larger. I'm too lazy to think whether it's something like x^2^2 or (x^2)^2 (or just x^2 since you fold it along width and height alternatively). Anyway it grows fast since an A4 sheet can be folded 7 times and a warehouse sized thinner sheet gets to 8.

      --
      ics
    8. Re:Finally.. by KiwiCanuck · · Score: 2, Informative

      The force required to deflect/bend a beam is proportional to the cube of the thickness. Each time you fold the paper you make it twice as thick, and therefore 8 times stronger.

  3. Space Exploration by Szentigrade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This could be a real boon to space exploration. Temperature extremes and radiation are two of the most common problems that must be dealt with when designing exploratory vehicles. This could simplify things greatly.

    --
    When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
    1. Re:Space Exploration by SEWilco · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, we can use the graphene in space if it survives the X-rays from the tape.

  4. 10 Atoms thick? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As per wikipedia,

    Diameter range: 62 pm (He) to 520 pm (Cs) (data page)

    Atom @ Wikipedia

    It seems that the "thickness" of an atom varies. I've never understood why it is used as a unit of measure.

    1. Re:10 Atoms thick? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      In this instance, it seems highly likely that they're referring to atoms of carbon as those are the atoms which compose the material involved.

    2. Re:10 Atoms thick? by treeves · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You'll notice from the data you found that they vary by less than one order of magnitude so it's still a useful approximate measure. Other "measurements" vary as well, for example "floors" to measure the height of a building, "blocks" to measure distance in a city or town, "car lengths" to measure tailgating, "gnat's asses"...oh never mind.

      --
      ...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
    3. Re:10 Atoms thick? by maglor_83 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Which is why everything should be measured in Libraries of Congress.

    4. Re:10 Atoms thick? by tylerni7 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Your math is correct, your chemistry isn't.
      A carbon atom has a covalent radius of about 80pm, but the atoms in sheets of graphite aren't bonded together. I don't know how far apart the atoms would rest, but it's going to be much farther than they would bond.

    5. Re:10 Atoms thick? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Informative

      The sheets were roughly 5 nanometers in diameter. Graphene is a form of carbon.

      Google tells me that 5 nanometers = 5000 picometers. Is my math off? It seems like there is a factor of 10 between how thick this stuff is and how thick Carbon is.

      One is talking about thickness, the other a diameter. The next paragraph of the article it says the sheets are a little under 1nm thick, and 10 C atoms would be around 800pm so that's a little under 1nm. The 5nm diameter would then be the other dimensions, these grown sheets are presumably circular. That dimension is important because that indicates how densely you could pack them on a surface.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    6. Re:10 Atoms thick? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not that much farther apart, since the article says that the sheets are less than 1nm thick.

      The figure he's quoting is a diameter, which would be the 2d dimensions of the sheet on the surface of the silicon they grew it on. It's the 5nm diameter that makes this exciting as a memory technology since that is very dense.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    7. Re:10 Atoms thick? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thank you, that makes much more sense. I think I've got it now. Let me try explaining it with a holiday metaphore:

      What they have created is, say, like a cookie. Each of these little cookies are 5 nanometeres in diameter. It's important to know that, because it lets us know how many cookies we can fit on our cookie pan. Each of these cookies are about 1nm tall. This is important because it affects how many of these cookie trays we could stack on top of each other in the oven.

      I was having a problem conceptualizing exactly what we were talking about until you described it as you did.

    8. Re:10 Atoms thick? by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I too read TFA and it seems to me they are leaving out the most important part(unless I missed it, which is: How many read/writes can they get out of this before it is toast? Because it can be the smallest, toughest little chip in the world but if you only get a couple of dozen read/writes out of it before it is toast than it'll be pretty damned useless. current read/write for NAND flash is up to,what, 1 million? So at the very least they'll need to shoot for that, and if you want to use it in space exploration you will want that number even higher if you can get it, due to how many years those deep space probes can run.

      So does anybody here have any idea what kind of read/writes we could expect from this? How about cost? How difficult will it be to ramp up production? Because for this to truly unseat NAND flash and become "the next big thing" they'll have to be able to really crank this stuff out due to the myriad of uses we have today for flash. And while I can see how this would have plenty of uses I just don't see this taking out NAND flash in the consumer market anytime in the foreseeable future.

      Hell NAND flash already survives longer than the device is considered useful right now. I have a handful of 64MB to 256Mb flash drives in my drawer that have survived more abuse than a device ever should and I just gave away an old Lyra 256Mb MP3 player that survived many years of being dropped, chunked, and having tunes tossed and put on pretty constantly for years. Damned if the thing ain't still just purring along. So in the consumer space I just don't see the need as NAND flash is pretty hard to kill and dirt cheap now. But in aerospace I bet this will be a Godsend.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    9. Re:10 Atoms thick? by elashish14 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Graphene is an array of sp2 hybridized carbon, meaning the HOMO is the pi bonding orbital, and the LUMO is the pi* orbital. The average electronic radius in the p orbital is a bit under 4 times the Bohr radius = 4*53 pm ~ 200 pm and it's safe to assume that the average distance of the pi bonding orbital is close. Since bonding must take place in the higher energy pi* orbital, it must be >>200pm. 1000pm sounds about right.

      The math isn't hard, but I have to take a shit so I can't do it right now.

      --
      I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
    10. Re:10 Atoms thick? by elashish14 · · Score: 2, Informative

      In case you didn't RTFA, NAND technology is predicted to reach its size limit in 2012 at 20nm. Graphene can reach much smaller than that. Additionally, they mentioned that it can already run at 100ns (read speed I assume) whereas MLC (current SSD bleeding edge) reads at 50ns right now.

      The current things that are holding it back right now are probably mass distribution and reliability. Honestly though, it will take a lot more to convince me that we'll be using graphene-based memory chips someday.

      --
      I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
    11. Re:10 Atoms thick? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are 10 atoms, so that's 800pm, which is close to 1nm yeah. :)

      Which, uh, you figured out to much greater accuracy than I know how to in another post. Hehe.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    12. Re:10 Atoms thick? by dakup · · Score: 2, Informative

      they vaporize it on another material. sorry.

  5. Re:piss by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Budweiser?

  6. Who needs new graphite memory? by bugnuts · · Score: 4, Funny

    You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper.

    You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.

    1. Re:Who needs new graphite memory? by jmerlin · · Score: 4, Funny

      Who knew? The most advanced memory created yet was invented far before the computer...

    2. Re:Who needs new graphite memory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.

      Your comment is clearly funny, but I wonder how these last compared to other forms of graphite.

      The article doesn't seem to mention anything about this memory's reliability or wear -- even theoretical stuff would be fine considering that the technology is relatively new.

    3. Re:Who needs new graphite memory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.

      Please explain to me how my pencil can do the read part of r/w memory.

    4. Re:Who needs new graphite memory? by revoldub · · Score: 3, Funny

      Who would have thought, thousands of years later, thousands of advancements in technology, and we're back to writing on rocks.

    5. Re:Who needs new graphite memory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.

      Please explain to me how my pencil can do the read part of r/w memory.

      Well look at you, you're all the fun at parties, aren't you?

  7. So.... by Antony-Kyre · · Score: 4, Funny

    no more microwaving your hard drive to aid in data destruction.

    1. Re:So.... by Firehed · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm pretty sure that microwaving your hard drive only aids in microwave destruction.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  8. Graphene for write-only memory by gluefish · · Score: 5, Funny

    The problem with using Graphene for write-only memory is that you need Pink Latexene to delete it. Fortunately they've discovered how to make extremely tiny cylinders of Pink Latexene, mounted on the end of yellow wooden sticks, to do such work. The combination of the graphene on one end of the stick and the pink cylinder on the other promises to allow nearly unlimited read-write capabilities, for mere pennies, distributed easily worldwide.

    --
    I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
  9. Graphene balloons by graft · · Score: 2, Funny

    For those who missed it, since it's not linked, a relevant story about researchers creating atom-thick graphene balloons that can hold several atmospheres of pressure. Made with Scotch tape. Yowza! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/08/192227&from=rss

    1. Re:Graphene balloons by oasisbob · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've worked with graphite before in a lab (we used it as a substrate for STM.

      Using scotch tape to pull up layers of graphite must be a common technique: we used it too. There are many kinds of graphite. Using crystalline graphite (found in nature), you could use the tape to pull up a nice thin layer.

      Being around improvised solutions using common materials was one of my favorite things about lab work.

  10. Vaporware by BlackSabbath · · Score: 5, Funny

    "...we grow it from the vapor phase..."

    Literally, vaporware.

  11. Phew! by powerslave12r · · Score: 2, Funny

    Thank god I didn't invest in SSD. Those are so obsolete.

    --
    Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
  12. I guess soon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    the RIAA et al will be wanting royalties off every pencil sold and Canada will have a pencil tax?

  13. She told me size doesn't matter... by psnyder · · Score: 5, Informative

    Reading the articles, it appears the size is nice, but it isn't the biggest deal here. They're projecting a bit smaller than 10nm, which is twice as small as next-generation flash drives that "projections show ... will reach its limit of 20nm by around 2012."

    The biggest deal here seems to be power management.

    What distinguishes graphene from other next-generation memories is the on-off power ratio - the amount of juice a circuit holds when it's on, as opposed to off. "It's huge - a million-to-one," said Tour. "Phase change memory, the other thing the industry is considering, runs at 10-to-1. That means the 'off' state holds, say, one-tenth the amount of electrical current than the 'on' state."

    Current tends to leak from an "off" that's holding a charge. "That means in a 10-by-10 grid, 10 'offs' would leak enough to look like they were 'on.' With our method, it would take a million 'offs' in a line to look like 'on,'" he said. "So this is big. It allows us to make a much larger array."

  14. Re:So if I cons up an 11 atom list ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    You're doing it wrong, you should have counted from zero.

  15. "Though we grow it from the vapor phase" by NinthAgendaDotCom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Interesting. That is how artificial diamonds are formed too... vapor forming around a diamond seed in a vacuum chamber.

    --
    -- http://ninthagenda.com/
  16. Graphene/Graphite by kyc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Graphene has been studied extensively in the last few years. Carbon Nanotubes were on the rise (which are just rolled up sheets of single layer graphite) but the current difficulties to manipulate those to create devices staggered their advance. Graphene ( or Graphite for that matter) is a little easier to manage because it's like a 2 -D sheet and it can be laid/printed off a substrate more easily.

    The current major problem of graphene is the lack of a sizable band-gap which is typically required for semiconductor modulation. We may see a breakthrough in the following years if people figure out a way to overcome this barrier.

    --
    There's plenty of room at the bottom! Richard P. Feynmann
  17. Finally... by NotPeteMcCabe · · Score: 2, Funny

    Finally, memory you can erase.

  18. Re:How would you dispose of such a thing? by 3.5+stripes · · Score: 2, Funny

    Not really, you'll just need to try and take a very important test with it.. it'll break almost immediately..

    --


    He tried to kill me with a forklift!
  19. Re:Ninjas? by aywwts4 · · Score: 5, Funny

    When cornered into a room by ninjas with nothing separating you from them but a door of wood, yes, thicker is better, but you will die regardless.

    I think you are confusing ninjas with zombies, zombies have thick wood door shredding powers while a ninja is already in the room with you.

    --
    Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
  20. It doesn't matter - Moore's Law ended this week. by RecycledElectrons · · Score: 2, Funny

    Get over it. There will be no faster computers now that the US Govt has bailed out the DRAM industry. Innovation like this is illegal!