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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.
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!
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
Theoretically they could to it with subatomic particles, in practice who knows when if ever that will become viable. If they manage it though, it would be pretty mindblowing. I'm guessing that it's going to be extremely difficult to accomplish and take decades to arrive, if it ever does.
They didn't solve a theoretical problem. The theoretical limit is a function of planks constant and the uncertainty principle and the amount of energy you're allowed to use. They solved (part of) the engineering problem. There's a ways to go before they solve the production/commercialization problem.
There are theoretical limits to how much information can be stored in a molecule -- this given by the molar entropy, typically expressed in J/(K*mol). But it can also be expressed, more intuitively, as bits per molecule.
(Yes, you can convert between J/K and bits -- they measure the same thing, degrees of freedom.)
Per this table, iron has a molar entropy of 27.3 J/K*mol, or 4.73 bits/molecule.
IBM is claiming an information density of (1/12) bits/molecule, which is reasonable -- the thermodynamic limit is ~57x greater.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
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
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.
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.!!!
So there is even more headroom in the thermodynamic limit.
You know, when you are storing bits and you are already at 12, where can you go from there? Where?
No where.
Ours goes to 11.
One smaller.
THL phish sticks
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.
Actually, an STM is typically about the size of a baseball. The vacuum chamber housing it, however...
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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.
It'd be foolish to try and engineer a bit per 12 atom storage device without first demonstrating that it is actually possible to do.
It is a proof of concept and shows that trying to use 12 atoms to store a bit isn't impossible.
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!
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.
You don't need to transmogrify it, just swap it; flipping a bit would require picking up the iron atom and placing a gold atom in its place.
Of course, this sounds pretty far out there too, but at least it doesn't require transmutation.