Slashdot Mirror
Penny-Sized CDs
|deity| pointed us at Discover Magazine, which is running an article about nanoimprint lithography. Cutting to the chase, this gives you 400 gigabytes per square inch, or 180 gigabytes on a CD the size of a penny. The advantage of this manufacturing process over others, such as the optical memory featured recently, is that the moulds can be reused, allowing easy mass production.
Does this mean that I'll be able to buy eleven penny-sized CDs for only a penny?
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Hmmm
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
The byline for the story said "Posted 7/27/98" so this is apparently fairly old news. It was the subject of a Slashdot article in July http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.shtm l. At any rate the commercial realization of this work will be some time off since it requires dramatic retooling and the development of a viable atomic force microscope on a chip. The article says 5-10 years, which I interpret as technospeak for not in the forseeable future.
What is more interesting to me is not how well this process will enable the encoding of a ROM since static data has limited applications which will be increasingly displaced by wide band network connections, but whether the atomic force microscope on a chip being developed by IBM will enable the manipulation of a miniature hard disk or particularily dense large hard disk.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
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... Size of a dime eh? Why can't they make these babies the size of a 12" vinyl album and give us some REAL storage power :-)
A little planning goes a long way...