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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!
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.
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)
The actual press release does not claim that they "made a chip". That's a fabrication of the ComputerWorld reporter.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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!"
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
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?
"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
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
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".
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?)