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NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB
CWmike writes "Engineers from North Carolina State University have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data. They said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, 'far exceeding the storage capacities of today's computer memory systems.' Using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change, the engineers worked at nanoscale and added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity. 'Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data,' said the team's leader, Jagdish 'Jay' Narayan, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at the university."
Are we talking in units of man hands or lady hands?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm going to have to buy The White Album again!
that is tiny. :D
If that had been available earlier this year, I wouldv had it implanted
liqbase
Sounds promising, but how many months/years/decades before we can reasonably expect to see this used on a wide scale?
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
They have made a material which could if you designed a suitable chip and associated circuitry, and figured out how to manufacture it at large scale, would let you store a terabyte of data on a fingernail sized chip.
The whoever wrote the article title should be embarrassed, as should timothy for propagating it.
A trillion bytes is a terabyte? You best be trollin', summary.
Uh, yeah!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
It had to happen eventually. Whether or not this is the actual limit, deponent answereth not.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Or just a demonstration of an artificial structure with resolution / density that'd permit 1 TB in whatever their size is?
I didn't see anything in the article that leads me to believe it's an actual storage device. Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's even necessarily a "fingernail-sized" chip they made, just that if you scaled their research to that size it'd hold 1 TB.
Any information other than this incredibly vague article? (I swear, more and more frequently we're seeing useless articles that say even less than the press release they're drawn from. And aren't the press releases often DESIGNED to be vague and over-promising, possibly to attract more research dollars?) Be nice if we'd just see their actual research, or a rough draft of a paper, or even just a frank interview with the geeks involved.
I wonder when personal computers will catch up with cell phones and mp3 players - any smaller, and we'll just lose them.
. . . so now I know how the Monty Python crew pulled off that trick . . . this music was stored on his fingernail!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
but:
The process would allow them to develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines. The engines could potentially achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon, Narayan said.
Could we at least have mentioned that this technology could potentially double the fuel efficiency of car engines???
I don't think so
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
TB:1,000,000,000,000
TiB:1,099,511,627,776
Different notations as to whats a Terabyte, the second one being the binary notation.
But more importantly, the summary* doesn't say which notation they're using, but because they say trillion we can assume the former. Why is that important? Look at the numbers.Thats 99 Gigs of difference.
*(Because I wouldn't read the full article)
It's great that you can store 1TB on it, but what does the performance look like? If it takes me 4 hours to pull a gig of data off of it, it's nearly useless. I could see some very, very corner cases where you need to store data indefinitely, and would be able to recover it with no timeline attached, but that's awfully rare nowadays. I want to see IOPS and access time ;) I'm also wondering how you would even read and write data. They seem to have left that detail out.
While they are light on details, the article implies this is a long term storage system (IE a flash chip replacement)
One would think creating RAM with a similar density would be possible as well.
I've used a super computer that had 74 TB of main memory, but clearly is something one can not afford nor fit in the home, to put it mildly. In a few years, will we have 1tb dimms at home? That would be sweet.
Even lacking that, a 1tb flash-like chip (not as in technology, but as in purpose/use) is still a huge improvement.
Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of the 100tb optical discs that are 'going into production within a year' for the last 10 years.
On a happier note, just imagine the reactions the RIAA/MPAA lawyers would have to such a thing existing!
"Now all of your 'IP' fits on a nine finger-nail-sized set!"
...athletes have been making millions that way for years!
can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text
Wait, how many Libraries of Congress is that??? Now I'm totally confused, you keep switching the units on me!
On second thoughts, it can probably store 1 copy of Windows 8.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It will be commercially available by January. The bad news is, this is a write only memory device.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah, I know that's humour from the age of floppy disks and Zee-Dee-Roms.
how we go from the below scientific journal abstract to the Slashdot headline: "NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB"?
We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch's T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.
Seriously, do you see anything about a chip in there? Anyone? Bueller?
Ten fingernails, each with 1/10 LoC capacity...the future is here, my friends.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Hey, if we multiply the capacity x size ratio by 50, does that mean that Moore's Law gets a vacation for the next, uhm... 5-6 years?
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
TB is used for both. Operating systems prefer 1.1 trillion while hard drive makers prefer 1 trillion because it makes their stuff seem 10% bigger.
"Most energy used today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces, but the energy created by the spinning of electrons produces no heat," the university state in a press release.
Anyone who knows anything at all about quantum mechanics knows that the spin of an electron is quantized and cannot change.
The Wikipedia article has this to say about spintronics:
Electrons are spin-1/2 fermions and therefore constitute a two-state system with spin "up" and spin "down". To make a spintronic device, the primary requirements are to have a system that can generate a current of spin polarized electrons comprising more of one spin species—up or down—than the other (called a spin injector), and a separate system that is sensitive to the spin polarization of the electrons (spin detector). Manipulation of the electron spin during transport between injector and detector (especially in semiconductors) via spin precession can be accomplished using real external magnetic fields or effective fields caused by spin-orbit interaction.
This makes MUCH more sense! Reporters are always notorious for getting the science wrong.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data
What's the point of saying "1 trillion"? Do you honestly expect anyone on this site to not know what a terabyte is? Or what is that good for?
Because, you know how the world works: When you lower your standards, and allow dumber people to use it... Then dumber people you shall have!
But not just dumber people. A Gaussian curve of dumber people. Including some, that don't even get *that*.
So if you then continue to sustain that endless cycle, you will soon find out, that only retards you will have left.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers
Why not compare area to area: A diameter of 1 million nanometers is 1000000 ^ 2 * pi = about 3140000000000 square nanometers.
The confusion probably arises because not all countries and languages use the same terminology for large numbers.
There are two naming conventions in general use, short-scale, and long-scale. In the short-scale countries such as the US, UK, etc, Trillion = 10^12, but in the long-scale countries, Trillion = 10^18. Obviously, if you are in a long-scale country, a Trillion (10^18) bytes is a (10^6) times more than a Terabyte (10^12 bytes). You can see this article for more on short and long scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
No. Because if they were any serious, they would be consistent in their meaning anyway, and, as it is standard in the storage industry, and as a SI unit, use TiB, if they meant TiB. And else TB. Period. No need to discuss it. Because that is all and everything.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Now I will be one step closer to having a complete backup of the internet.
The difference between one ISO terabyte and 1 TiB is relatively smaller than the variance among normal fingernails.
Here is the paper's abstract:
Now, my question is, how do you store information in that? If the material is paramagnetic, that implies it isn't stored like a disk (read/write using a magnetic field)? How are they planning on storing information in a clump of nickel atoms? (Note: I know absolutely nothing about this stuff)
Can we change the title of this post to...
NCSU's THEORETICAL Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB
It's safe to say now that "trillion", as an English word, means 10^12 in English-speaking places.
Hands in my pocket
This is yet another of those articles where somebody did something vaguely promising in materials science, and it's immediately being touted as if it were a product.
They're not talking about a "chip" at all. The material they've produced sounds more like something that might work as a disk surface. "Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet." It's not clear what you'd use as a read/write head, even if they can create a surface of "nanodots".
I mean...they could be going by these:
http://thechive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/longest-fingernails-world.jpg
Which, to be honest..would not be too impressive to stick 1TB on a fingernail like that.
Won't ever fit because we store the backup on the internet.
Table-ized A.I.
Wikipedia is wrong, as usual. A terabit, terabyte or teraword is 40 address lines. You can say it's 10e12 when they go back to making decade logic. If you want to get punched in the face then say tebi.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
CREEPROM!
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Just goto walmart, buy your HD movie, music, PS4 game, etc...on a flash card ? Plug it into your mp3 player, car deck, TV, Xbox, PC.....Well, probably not PS4 since its from sony it would use its own special sony only format. But everyone else just use a universal flash media format, and it wouldnt get ruined by a scratch from dust either.
Alex: "Two geeks penetrating a system backdoor?"
Contestant: "What is DDRASSRAM?, Alex."
Alex: Painfully correct sir, painfully correct.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Having 2^(x+3) bits has not a lot to do with the fact that you then have 2^(2^(x+3)) combinations of them... (except for certain integer math operations which are for implementation reasons faster if done on a power-of-2 number of bits, like cryptography. But this is not a fundamental matter.)
Also, "quantum logical units" made me vomit in my mouth.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
We are so close to answering the ancient question — how many angels would fit on a pinhead? The prevailing opinion is, angels are ethereal beings, and thus infinite number of them would fit anywhere. But information is not tangible either (some even refuse to accept, that it can be owned), and yet obvious — if ever shrinking — limits exist to information concentration...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In my country both systems are used (one for English and one for my first language). They realized that this was still not confusing enough so they temporarily switched to the other and then switched back.
You can luckily usually guess which number it is - if it deals with government corruption or arms deals it is usually the larger one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#South_African_usage
You should clarify usage scenarios with your amounts.
Metric:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
OSX:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
Ubuntu/Linux:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
BSD: (last I checked)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
HDD Manufacturers: (Since before it became a problem)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
Windows:
TB: 1,099,511,627,776
TiB: WTF LOL
And of course, there are specific scenarios like RAM and cache where the incorrect suffixes are used to this day. When you have "3 MB" of L2 cache, you know it's 3072KiB, which is 3,145,728 bytes. It should be labelled "3 MiB", but it isn't.
a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers
Also, 1 millimeter, a giga-picometer, a tera-femtometer, a....
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
If there's a B, b, or a reference to bits or bytes, then it's in powers of 2.
Not for bandwidth. Base-2 units have never been used to describe bandwidth. (If you have a 1MB per second connection, that's exactly 1,000,000 bytes per second.)
Not for hard drive capacity at any time later than ancient history.
Not for floppy disks, which were always in ridiculous mixed units of 1024*1000.
Not for optical media, which come in sizes like 4,700,000,000 bytes.
Not for file sizes reported in any non-braindead application.
In fact, not for anything other than solid state RAM.
So your assertion that "there is no confusion" is 100% false. The explicit distinction between TB and TiB should be strictly enforced in all contexts due to the historical abuse of SI terminology by people like you.
It is IMPERATIVE to measure bits in (base 2) exponential terms because bits are quantum logical units. We count them, and we are concerned with possible comibnations in a given number of bits.
This statement makes zero sense. You're confusing the number of permutations that "n" bits can denote with the number "n" itself. Just because the number of permutations of n bits happens to be 2**n, that property in no way constrains us to denote measurements of the number n itself in some strange hybrid derivative of base 2 and base 10. (Which is only slightly more convenient to do arithmetic with than Roman numerals. Quick: how many 100 MiB files fit onto a 4.377 GiB DVD?)
I wasn't sure at first if they were setting the data by doping the material, but on closer reading ..."
"The engineers manipulated the nanomaterial so the electrons' spin within the material could be controlled,
makes it sound electrically re-writeable. Which is probably the only thing anyone's really interested in,
unless it was super-cheap. (i.e. cheap enough to replace pressed optical discs with ROM USB-storage.)
As bobjr94 hopes, it would be nice if it is that cheap, though, and optical discs are replaced by a standard flash storage standard.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
RAM and solid state Flash memory, which is becoming increasingly popular. NOR flash comes in power-of-two sizes, and NAND flash comes in power-of-two main data areas plus some power-of-two over power-of-two fraction in out-of-band area (64 OOB bytes per 2048 data bytes is common). However, Flash wear-leveling by controllers reduces available size, and sometimes they are designed so it works out at closer to a power-of-ten size, but that's just a random target (and they never actually nail it). It's also worth noting that storage block sizes are powers of two (512 byte sectors for HDDs, 2048 bytes for DVDs, and in reality both formats tend to use larger physical sectors of a power-of-two size too). So, in reality, there is no such thing as a purely decimal round size hard disk: it's all crazy mixed multiples that round off to somewhere close to a decimal unit yet still a multiple of a smaller binary unit. People keep complaining about the weird 1000*1024 units used by floppies (an artifact of turning 1440KiB into "1.44MB"), but that's how modern storage sizes are built too (except you report them as real power-of-ten rounded sizes in the end).
Powers of two are still heavily used as base units in the computing world. You can aim for a target near a power of 10, but very rarely do you see actual precise powers of ten in use. The common exception is clock rates and, by extension, bandwidth.
One typical place where users will see power-of-two sizes is in hard disk allocation size ("actual size on disk"). It's very evident for small files.
OK, I've done the RTFM, and I've read most of the posted comments here too. But I can't find the answer to the most basic question of all, just what type of memory is this? Is it some sore of flash memory? Is it volatile RAM, and if RAM is it Static or Dynamic and what is it's access speed (also worth knowing if it is some sort of flash RAM). And of course that includes all of the other related technical data, like how how many read/write cycles it can survive. I can't get too excited about thinking this might show up in a computer in my lifetime unless there is some technical discussion about what kind of hardware this really is.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
C:\>head -n 1000000 /dev/random > Windows.com
'head' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
WTF?! It's not working. I tried rebooting, but I got the same problem. Not even running as Administrator helped.
Can you please give me head? You can email me at AnonymousCoward@aol.com.
Also, I'd like to know how you know so much about me, and why you're using my name, and give me some Photoshop tips while you're at it.
http://www.national.com/rap/files/datasheet.pdf
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
In other news today scriptwriters working on the sequel of the wildly successful Jonny Mnemonic scrambled to incorporate the technical advance into the sequel's script. Now, Jonny's nail polish is sacrificed to accomodate the large amount of valuable data.
Agreed:
1. Quantum is too often a buzzword used on a par with 'synergizing syncronicities to leverage deflector dish rerouting'.
2. Quantum bits are now a real concept, and this use conflicts with that.
Now if 'sexconker' had said something along the lines of:
Since bits are physically base 2, and many operations in a machine are physically faster or more functional if done on integral exponents of 2 numbers of bits, measuring bits in base 2 is more meaningful...
I might have agreed.
There are other operations besides cryptography where powers of 2 figure into it. For just two examples: paging memory, sectoring drives (i.e. look at LBA, if anyone still has hard drives small enough that addressing is a choice. Whether fdisk (or similar) gave you certain partitioning options (and whether the drive actually worked afterwards) were base 2 dependent issues). Back when people still used Windows 98, it had a system to organise frequently loaded programs into '4 K' blocks, and it used that size even if the hard drive sectors were '16 K' or '32 K'. All those numbers were actually base 2, regardless of how Microsoft reported them on screen. If you're talking software, saying it's not fundamental is fair enough, but when you have to talk hardware, the special cases where it matters multiply rapidly.
The debate reminds me of comparing American and French unemployment figures. Personally, I think people who have been out of work for a long time and given up reporting their status to the government should still be counted as best we can estimate them. Some formulas for reporting unemployment simply look better than others, or more basic to what we are measuring.
There are some complex forms of unemployment measurement, such as estimating numbers of 'underemployed' people, or people who want a job with health insurance and cant move up into one, but those seem more ambiguous and of less general use. That's also how I see measuring memory in base 10.
Who is John Cabal?
Finaly I can look forward to Johnny Mnemonic 2. Only this time he stores the information in his nails.
Almost right, except that bandwidth is always expressed in terms of bits rather than bytes (i.e. Mbps - "Mega Bits Per Second" where Mega = 1,000,000). In general, due to overheads from error correction, signalling and control protocols the actual throughput of a circuit does not equal the Mbps value divided by eight.
Just my tuppence worth ;-)
Moore's law is not a law. Theory, yes; Predictable trend, certainly; Law, no.
Thats 99 Gigs of difference.
Thanks for muddying that up for us. Are those 99 decimal "Gigs" or 99 binary "Gigs"? Your comment doesn't say.
More importantly, by rounding off using normal conventions the difference is 100 GB or 93 GiB.
Since we are talking about digital computers based on the binary numerical system, using base 2 makes a lot more sense than using base 10.
1.01
It is weird that I have not seen a post about p0rn yet!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
No, 1.1. 1 kib = 1.024 kb, 1 mib = 1.048 mb, i gib = 1.074 gb, 1 tib = 1.100 tb.
Actually, CD-Rs are 700MiB (well, ~702MiB) where DVD-R's are 4.7GB. Why one is set in base-2 and the other in base-10 I never understood...
-SaNo
How stable is it,
and how fast is it?
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Capacity insecurity? "Really, it's bigger! It's just the lack of OS file compression that makes it seem small!"
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
I'm surprised every time I see just how much sexual frustration slashdotters tend to build up
This is wrong. It's:
TB:1,099,511,627,776
TiB: Does not compute
I read it. They didn't actually implement memory, They don't have read or write hardware. It's just something that might be used for memory some day.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
The one I'n still looking for (lost my copy) is the darkness emitting arsenic diode.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Ni-MgO.
Yeah. I read that as Mi-go. Go figure. I guess I just want my brain cylinder to be full of these chips.
Back to sleep, for now. ;^)
--
Toro
Quick, how many 100 MB files fit onto a 4.377 GB DVD?
So answer it, asshole, without getting out a calculator. Go ahead.
It's actually only a 92 GB difference.
Sigs are for suckers.
Do not try to purchase the chip. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth...
What truth?
There is no chip.
IBM invented a storage device with infinite capacity, problem was seek times were forever!
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
"North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of[...]" says the NCSU news item, first line. The execrable ComputerWorld article starts out "Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold[...]" I hate this kind of lazy, irresponsible journalism!