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IBM Shrinks Bit Size To 12 Atoms
Lucas123 writes "IBM researchers say they've been able to shrink the number of iron atoms it takes to store a bit of data from about one million to 12, which could pave the way for storage devices with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's devices. Andreas Heinrich, who led the IBM Research team on the project for five years, said the team used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope and unconventional antiferromagnetism to change the bits from zeros to ones. By combining 96 of the atoms, the researchers were able to create bytes — spelling out the word THINK. That solved a theoretical problem of how few atoms it could take to store a bit; now comes the engineering challenge: how to make a mass storage device perform the same feat as scanning tunneling microscope."
Preface: I'm just a programmer nerd who reads slashdot. I have no idea what I am talking about.
I wonder if it would be possible to have data storage as an ionization of a solid in the normal operating range of tech (and probably small, like carbon) where ionized atoms represent one bits and non ionized represent zero bits, and you can read atoms in some rigid lattice where the ionized ones represent ones and the neutral atoms are zeroes. Yea, there are huge problems, like preventing electron shell state dropping and keeping the electrons off the negatively charged carbon, but it seems like it would be a great objective considering the smaller data storage type after atom ionization will be measuring quark states to represent multi valued data.
How do we know it isn't possible to store a bit in fewer than 12 atoms? I'm not seeing how that "solved" anything, only that they proved it was possible to store a bit with as few as 12 atoms.
IBM's new vision:
A scanning tunneling microscope in every home with an IBM sticker on it.
...once they have these new mass-storage devices, how can I turn it into a homebrew tunnel scanning microscope?
Now they just have to work on that random access time of 300000 milliseconds.
Should be easy, right?
Now give me my subdermal and/or extraneural memory storage, dammit.
. . . now as to shrinking that scanning tunneling microscope . . . that might take a while . . .
Is anyone aware of how "big" they are . . . I'm not thinking that the word "small" is appropriate . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm only a two bit chemist, but per atom doesn't sound very exact since atoms vary in weight between 1 dalton (1/(6e23)grams) and way over 200 times that.
To be fair, have you seen how big the first Magnetic HDD's were? Granted, different technology and they still stored a hell of a lot more than 5 bytes, but miniaturisation is only a matter of time.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The smallest one I have seen is about half the size of a compact car. But I think they get down to the size of a desk.
What an attractive piece of technology...
Preface: I'm just a programmer nerd who reads slashdot. I have no idea what I am talking about.
Most of us consider that a given here.
More likely you will see this sort of thing used by "cloud" providers, who can afford a high up-front cost and greatly expand their capacity. A lot of data will sit unused on service providers' storage devices, and so they can have a much higher ratio of storage to computing power.
Palm trees and 8
[0] Engineering problems notwithstanding.
Increasing disk density only solves a handful of problems. Unfortunately it can create more problems as well. As disk size increases, more and more applications will become io bound due to contending for the same piece of metal. For many, if not most, organizations that need large amounts of data, increasing per disk density is pointless unless new technology can be introduced to retrieve it at an exponentially faster rate.
There's a better article here which includes some more information on the experiment. In particular the temperature was 0.5K.
Also the computerworld article claims that using an antiferromagnetic arrangement of atoms is an advantage because it pulls the atoms more tightly together. I'm not convinced that this is true but even if it is the effect would be completely negligible. The interesting aspect of this arrangement is that each atom cancels out the magnetic field of the atoms either side of it which should help with data stability (a similar effect is seen in perpendicular recording today).
Unrelatedly: have they/will they publish a paper on this? I can't find anything mentioning a paper in the press releases.
Had they used the clearly superior RAD-50 encoding, they could have stored THINK with a mere 384 atoms as opposed to 480.
Maybe now we can read all that data stored in those Crystal Skulls.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The term "large" is not even appropriate in terms of data storage.
I thought the size of one bit IS one bits. Next they'll tell you that the size of atom is yellow.
From what I understand the most severe engineering challenge with designing a portable STM will be overcoming the vibration issues. Current "home brew" STMs are built in a sandbox for this reason, afaik.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
I can see it now. 500 petabytes stored on a postage stamp housed in a device the size of an overstuffed, large suitcase. It has geek written all over it! I must have one.!!!
Imagine having a hard disk with a capacity of 2,000 TB. Using a SATA 3.0 bus with a sustained maximum throughput of 600 MiB/s, it would still take over 37 days to read or write the entire device.
. . . now as to shrinking that scanning tunneling microscope . . . that might take a while . . .
Is anyone aware of how "big" they are . . . I'm not thinking that the word "small" is appropriate . . .
Example
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I think, perhaps, here, the challenge would be finding a rapid, cheap way to write/read the data, but one idea that occured to me, instead of ionizing atoms is, what if you could find a simple molecule which could be changed to another simple molecule by the addition/reduction of one atom.
Something like Carbon Monoxide = 0, Carbon Dioxide = 1. Seems like you could potentially get a lot of data density with something like that?
Actually, an STM is typically about the size of a baseball. The vacuum chamber housing it, however...
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you can get an STM that will fit on your desk (played with one in undergrad)
Tunneling accelerometers are mainstream. They are basically a STM without the scanning ability, with the "pinhead" on a MEMs arm. These are in tiny chips. Combining these with perhaps thermal expansion "heater" actuators, and you have a crude yet tiny STM, with very limited storage capacity (limited by X * Y travel / bit spacing.
An actual STM instrument is pretty big. About the size of, say, a mini-fridge. But the majority of that is the computer to drive the system, the readout electronics, and the enclosure (to dampen out vibrations, establish vacuum, etc.). The actual readout tip is pretty small: a nano-sized tip attached to ~100 micron 'diving board' assembly.
A related problem with STM is that it's a serial process: you have a small tip that you're scanning over a surface. This makes readout slow. However in a separate project, IBM (and others) has been working on how to solve that: the idea is to use a huge array of tips that scan the surface in parallel (IBM calls it millipede memory). This makes access faster since you can basically stripe the data and read/write in parallel, and it makes random seeks faster since you don't have to move the tip array as far to get to the data you want. It increases complexity, of course, but modern nano-lithography is certainly up to the task of creating arrays of hundreds of thousands of micron-sized tips with associated electronics.
Using tip arrays would make the read/write parts more compact (as compared to having separate parallel STMs, I mean). The enclosure and driving electronics could certainly be miniaturized if there were economic incentive to do so. There's no physical barrier preventing these kinds of machines from being substantially micronized. As others have pointed out, the first magnetic disk read/write systems were rather bulk, and now hard drives can fit in your pocket. It's possible the same thing could happen here. Having said that, current data storage techniques have a huge head-start, so for something like this to catch up to the point where consumers will want to buy it may take some time.
So they should have this ready for practical applications in the consumer market right about the same time hard drive component manufacturing becomes available and, coincidentally, about the same time the hard drive industry jumps on the Thunderbolt bandwagon. Perhaps this trifecta will also coincide with the Third Coming of Steve Jobs -- with no hard drives available, almost no one using his new Thunderbolt, and no ability to store his entire movie collection on one hard drive, he figured he'd leave Earth for a while and come back when we were ready for him.
Anyone else pick up on the note in TFA about how this technology uses 96 bits to make one byte of data? I wonder if the drive sizes will be advertised in bits to make them seem even more ridiculously impressive!
To be fair, have you seen how big the first Magnetic HDD's were? Granted, different technology and they still stored a hell of a lot more than 5 bytes, but miniaturisation is only a matter of time.
Yep, according to the idiots at MSNBC, we're already there.
Talk about reading comprehension failures.
Sigh.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They only reduced the size a *little bit*.
The question now is, how many (or should I say few) atoms do you need to address and change the value of one of these bits?
IBM is applying this technology to storage space right now, but is it also applicable to processing power? Could this sudden advancement in technology be very problematic for the global economy? If we have come to the end of Moore's Law already, then what's next? Processing power can't be increased any further so there will be no reason for people to upgrade their PCs - why bother when CPUs aren't getting any more powerful?. And quantum computing is a long way off, so I imagine this could be VERY bad for not just the computer industry, but for the global economy as a whole. The industry may have to consider other ways to entice consumers...
a 1 or 0 value? Isn't that like ancient history for storage?
Memristor devices due to be out in a year or two or three will have a 'bit' value much larger than base 2 and take up the same amount of space. About 10nm I believe.
When I read IBM's earth-shattering breakthrough, I think I yawned.
The size isn't as much of a problem as the speed. How long did it take them to write 5 measly bytes? Anything competing with HDs has to be able to achieve at least 3Gb/s.
True, but we've learned a lot of other things since those first hard drives that still probably apply: manufacturing techniques for making high-precision assemblies at extremely low cost, highly reliable low-friction bearings (like the hydrodynamic bearings I believe HDs use) for the spinning media, miniaturized servo motors, etc. It might not be that long before something using this technology comes along.
"We can manufacture gazillionabyte memory chips the size of a pinhead. Of course, the interface hardware for reading/wrting the data is the size of a small fridge..."
I've seen researchers at our university create 256 qbits in a single atom. Of course, qbits are not directly usable in conventional computing...
256 qbit per atom would mean you use the entire electron structure of the atom, but you still need to ridiculously ionize it to have that much of electrons because atoms above 110 protons/electrons kind of don't live too long.
Still you can't use it for crypto, because in a single atom the relationship (entanglement) between qbits is pretty much fixed.
So the best way seems to be one qbit per atom. But storing qbits long term is even harder than computing with them.
I don't want an order of magnitude more storage; I want to be able to process all the storage that I have in the blink of an eye.
Reminds me of an old IBM (or Telex?) printer I once worked on. Instead of a printhead that scanned across the whole page, the printhead was a bar that went across the whole page with pins every quarter inch or so. The bar vibrated back and forth and it was able to print an entire line of text in a couple of vibrations. I think tape drives are like that now- the head is (made up number for simplicity) really 8 heads, and it reads and writes one byte at a time. When it gets to the end of the tape, it steps up a track and reads the next stream of bytes. So the tape has (say) 64 physical tracks that are read 8 at a time.
I think it's neat and all, but I wonder if spinning magnetic media is really the way to go? Seems like the industry is leaving it behind.