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Molecular Clusters That Can Retain Charge Could Revolutionize Computer Memory

Posted by Soulskill on from the ever-smaller-ever-faster dept.

jfruh writes:Computing devices have been gobbling up more and more memory, but storage tech has been hitting its limits, creating a bottleneck. Now researchers in Spain and Scotland have reported a breakthrough in working with metal-oxide clusters that can retain their charge. These molecules could serve as the basis for RAM and flash memory that will be leagues smaller than existing components (abstract).

22 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Leagues smaller by Megahard · · Score: 4, Funny

    I do not think that word means what you think it means.

    --
    I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
    1. Re:Leagues smaller by njahnke · · Score: 1

      How many leagues in a library of congress?

    2. Re:Leagues smaller by lannocc · · Score: 2

      How many leagues in a library of congress?

      20,000 leagues under the C.

      --
      -IOVAR Web Dev Platform
  2. Will this go the same way as the spintronics? by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 2

    Not that long ago people were talking about the huge breakthrough the spintronics would bring - that we are going to have terabytes of DRAM which could retain their memory even when power was switched off, that we could turn on our PC and have an almost instantaneous boot-up

    So where is the spintronics nowadays?

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    1. Re:Will this go the same way as the spintronics? by Ken_g6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Spintronics is a quantum thing - a way of specifying more information in each electron. As such, it's very difficult to work with.

      This is more similar to carbon nanotubes. They're a new thing, which could be very useful, if only you could cheaply and efficiently manufacture them and put them in the proper places on a chip. However:

      "One major benefit of the POMs we've created is that it's possible to fabricate them with devices which are already widely used in industry, so they can be adopted as new forms of flash memory without requiring production lines to be expensively overhauled," Lee Cronin, a chemist involved in the research, said in a University of Glasgow release.

      So using these may be more realistic than carbon nanotubes!

      --
      (T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
    2. Re:Will this go the same way as the spintronics? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      I for one would really love to see microgravity construction overlords. Lightweight stuff that can only be made in space could be the incentive to progress beyond whatever the Russians will sell us to fly with.
      However I think it's biochemistry that's the key there - reaction rates etc differ without the shear force from gravity and it hasn't been looked at much yet. It's possible that there are drugs that can only be made effectively in space, and such things are frequently worth far more than their weight in gold (or reaction mass costs to get stuff up and down).

      As for nanotech, it's going on as it was when it was called "surface technology" and similar before Drexler's books, but it just can't quite deliver the Newtonian behaviour that is suggested by Drexler's books and newspaper derivations because quantum mechanical effects get in the way. However those effects already give us products with gecko like adhesion from lots of nanoscale hair-like structures.

    3. Re: Will this go the same way as the spintronics? by JoeRobe · · Score: 1

      "reaction rates etc differ without the shear force from gravity and it hasn't been looked at much yet."

      [citation needed]

        I'm a chemist, and I have yet to see a case where gravity plays a measurable role in standard single-phase chemical reactions. Yes, it may play a role in bulk biphasic reactions. But in a standard liquid-phase biochemical reaction, local diffusion forces (collisions) will overwhelm gravity. In addition, most biochemical reactions are stirred to maximize contact between reagents further reducing the effects of gravity.

      You may be able to find a reaction or two that is affected by gravity, but those will be a few and far between.

      --
      The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
    4. Re: Will this go the same way as the spintronics? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The second result on google for "microgravity reactions" is this:
      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
      The first is this one which is far less useful:
      http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

      There's a current experiment on the ISS along those lines that was mentioned in the mainstream press a couple of months back but I can't seem to track down a link. The biochemist interviewed was of the opinion that we have no idea how many reactions are influenced by gravity and was surprised to find so many so quickly.

    5. Re: Will this go the same way as the spintronics? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      I was asked about people looking at it and so provided links that google threw up as examples and wrote about where I had heard of it. It's not a literature review.

  3. Paywalls pain me by dixonpete · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I understand that science journals have their place but I ain't paying no $32 to read an article. Why don't the authors submit a decently detailed popular version as a press release once their article gets accepted for the rest of us?

    1. Re:Paywalls pain me by martin-boundary · · Score: 1
      Frankly, that's not good enough either. Popular articles often get the science wrong, and without any evidence that anyone can check (like an actual link to a freely available paper) that would be just spreading rumours and disinformation.

      The policy should be: either link to a freely accessible version of the original research, or skip the story entirely. Anything else does more harm than good.

  4. Evolution not revolution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The basic idea behind flash is that you have small electron traps - areas which you can charge by injecting electrons through a barrier - which you clear by draining out those electrons in bulk. This seems to be a reasonable way to make smaller traps. Then again, small traps are part of the poor lifetimes of new flash, and the area size of a single cell is less relevant when you can stack them. So this may provide a small improvement, or offer a different set of trade-offs. But fundamentally bits don't get smaller nor cheaper by an order of magnitude with this idea. Even if it's viable, it's just an evolutionary improvement. And it may very well fail if it turns out to be a small improvement for a truly different process.

    1. Re:Evolution not revolution by dixonpete · · Score: 1

      Ya. An estimate of speed and increase in storage density would have been appreciated too. You can't do this kind of research without having done at least a back of the envelope calculation.

    2. Re:Evolution not revolution by gigaherz · · Score: 1

      A sufficiently fast evolution can easily be called a revolution. The industrial revolution was actually just an evolution of industry, yet everyone does know it as a revolution. Why? Because it happened really fast.

      The title does say it *could* revolutionize. It may just be a small improvement, or fail completely, but it could be a revolution if it suddenly brings fast, cheap, high-density memory in a scale much greater than Flash memory is able to provide.

    3. Re:Evolution not revolution by Teun · · Score: 1
      If taken in the framework of previous technical development, like since the Greeks or Romans, those 60 to 80 years were revolutionary fast.

      Don't compare the time-scale of the industrial revolution to the next version of Firefox.

      --
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  5. "Blah, blah, blah... by theronb · · Score: 1

    ...could revolutionize..." How many stories have we seen about tech "breakthroughs" in solar energy, chip architecture, batteries, cold fusion or perpetual motion with breathless hype that never pan out? There is some information here but the speculation is uncalled for.

    1. Re:"Blah, blah, blah... by gigaherz · · Score: 1

      As many as research teams in need of more funding.

  6. Any discussion on the topic is useless by Required+Snark · · Score: 2
    There is no content outside the pay wall that is useful.

    What does a 'write-once-erase’ access model mean? For all we know, it means they can only write the data once, not more then once, and erase it without the ability to do any reads. That's one interpretation of those three words in that order.

    Is there some way we can retroactively erase this from Slashdot? It's so broken it cannot be fixed.

    Everyone leave this now and don't come back. It's the closest we can get to erasing it. That's what I'm doing. Now.

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    Why is Snark Required?
  7. FYI: line one of abstract by dbIII · · Score: 1

    "Two decades of research in microgravity have shown that certain biochemical processes can be altered by weightlessness"
    The research is narrowing down what is going on and not refuting the idea entirely as the AC who is both quoting it as an authoritative source and calling it "Space Nutter junk" is suggesting.

    1. Re: FYI: line one of abstract by JoeRobe · · Score: 1

      I maintain the assertion that the number of reactions that are affected by gravity very few and far between. In fact the last sentence of that abstract contradicts one of the few examples that claimed to observe effects of weightlessness.

      Just thinking about this physically, the forces associated with electrostatic interactions and molecular diffusion are many orders of magnitude larger than that of gravity. Gravity is not relevant on the molecular scale. Any effects that may be relevant would be associated with differences in solvent flow or phase-related reactions.

      --
      The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  8. I don't want to precipitate an argument, but ... by dbIII · · Score: 1

    I don't want to "precipitate" an argument, but have you actually thought of the implications of a lack of gravity at all? It's not all perfect solutions or things perfectly suspended after all. You may dismiss my words as scum or dross, but I'm just floating out an idea that will hopefully sink in. What would changing the concent
    Biochemistry is not my field, but I did a bit of stuff with metal solidification and gravity is a pretty major factor with concentration of different phases in ingots since the crystals that don't form attached to an edge usually sink. It's a bit hard to muck about with molten metal in space though - even mercury and potassium are very nasty things to have in something where a crack would be catastrophic.

  9. Re:I don't want to precipitate an argument, but .. by JoeRobe · · Score: 1

    I'm not the one calling your words scum or dross. It's a legitimate question that I'm responding to. I have in fact thought about the implications of a lack of gravity upon chemical reactions, which is why I pointed out the few cases where it would be important. For homogeneous reactions (which are central to biochemistry), I encourage you to calculate the force of gravity, compared to local electrostatic forced such as dipoles and bond dipoles.

    I agree with what you're saying that precipitation reactions will be affected by lack of gravity, as I repeatedly pointed out when I refer to biphasic reaction and phase-related reactions.

    --
    The best way to predict the future is to invent it.