Slashdot Mirror
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."
Mama was apparently wrong about nailbyting.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
I asked a female co-worker to help me compare, and she obliged......by flipping me off. At least I got a good look at her nail. The things we nerds endure for science.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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
That reminds me of a true story.
A few years ago I received my first PDA phone. It was HTC through AT&T and it did have a camera. I went through the office asking people for a picture for my phone. Explaining that when they dialed me, I could see their picture instead of the phone number. I went through about 20 offices and cubicles on my break to get those pictures.
They ALL GAVE ME THE FINGER. Every single one of those comical bastards. No prompting, No hesitation. It was, "Can I get a picture of you for my phone?". They all turned around and flipped me off. Women as well as men.
Even the owner of the company was there that day. He flipped me off too.
Could it have been me? Nah.
It was memories of the Vista you installed on all PC's.
Table-ized A.I.