Molecular Clusters That Can Retain Charge Could Revolutionize Computer Memory

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).

Comments

Leagues smaller

[Megahard]

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

Re:Leagues smaller

[lannocc]

How many leagues in a library of congress?

20,000 leagues under the C.

Will this go the same way as the spintronics?

[Taco Cowboy]

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?

Re:Will this go the same way as the spintronics?

[Ken_g6]

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!

Paywalls pain me

[dixonpete]

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?

Any discussion on the topic is useless

[Required Snark]

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.