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Science Technology

Atomic Scale Memory 265

Posted by michael from the quarks-coming-next dept.
maddugan writes "Technology Research News is reporting that researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material."
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Atomic Scale Memory More

Atomic Scale Memory

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  • I predict 20 posts joking about how this memory will improve the performance of the next version of Windows, or being just barely enough for the next version of Windows.

  • Cool! (Score:3, Funny)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:57PM (#4030332) Homepage
    I'll only need 5 drawers for my Pr0n collection now!
  • Gives a whole new meaning to the term "atomic transactions"!

  • Whoooohooo!!! (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 )
    Now imagine all that pr0n!!!

  • New possible high-capacity storage format, huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Erpo ( 237853 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:01PM (#4030350)
    I wonder how long it'll be before the *AA asks for a tax on atoms "to offset the costs of piracy".
  • Movies could be 1 Terabyte in size.

  • MPAA/RIAA (Score:3, Funny)

    by sdo1 ( 213835 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:01PM (#4030352) Journal
    Oh man are those guys gonna be pissed.

    -S
    • hey, i live in madis....hmmm, bright flash of light. looks like its daytime. and now it's gone. wonder what that was? didn't hear anything... yet.

      Uh-oh. Don't be surprised if i never post again.

  • cant resist (Score:4, Funny)

    by loconet ( 415875 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:02PM (#4030357) Homepage

    "7,800 DVDs ought to be enough for anybody" - loconet 2002
    • you obviously have no concept of what constitutes a "thorough" collection of porn . . . .
    • 7,800 DVDs ought to be enough for anybody" - Ioconet 2002.

      You obviously are not thinking about the next, much larger release of Windows, which follows after Windows XP, and will be marketed under the name Windows SUX.
  • Just imagine if you scratched it like a DVD or CD, you could wipe out an entire movie with just a little one.

  • WOW! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by TGK ( 262438 )
    Imagine a Beowol^H^H^H^H^H^H.... oh wait... never mind.

  • Feh. Only ONE bit per atom... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mad Bad Rabbit ( 539142 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:04PM (#4030364)

    Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to
    store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.

    http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pnu 42 9-2.htm

    >:K
    • Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.

      I seem to recall that a group used similar techniques to store much more than that (they wanted to encode a small image's bits).

      The problem, of course, is that readout tends to be destructive, and you'll have a lot of fun trying to compete on a density basis with the solid-substrate schemes :).

  • I'm going to.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Frank of Earth ( 126705 ) <frank AT fperkins DOT com> on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:04PM (#4030369) Homepage Journal
    .. mirror Kaaza just in case it goes offline.
  • So much for needing mp3's, we could just keep everything ripped at the 320 kbps wav with room to spare

    or

    we're going to need an mp3 style for the dvd audio songs (if that ever catches on)

    • Re:mp3's (Score:3, Informative)

      by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 )
      Um, a 320 kilobits per second .wav would sound like crap.

      CD audio is 44,100 samples per second per channel. Each sample is 16 bits and there are 2 channels.

      That works out to 1411200 bits per second, or just over 1378 kbps.

      Anyway, after working with 96kHz/24bit/multitrack studio equipment CDs sound like crap too. Which is what DVD-A is pretty close to. I think Vorbis streams have support for higher sampling rates, greater bit depth, and >2 channels.
  • More storage space than I know what to do with, for this week at least.

  • Eh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ShooterNeo ( 555040 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:07PM (#4030381)
    This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage. In fact I'd venture to say that this technology is NOT what we will be using in the future for extremely dense memory. Why? Because its 2 dimensional and requires an independent readout head (that is MECHANICAL). Making it work anywhere but a vacuum may be impossible. (though that is not a real problem : making a disk drive that has an internal vacuum is quite feasible) A solution that is thousands, even millions of times faster would be a system that reads itself : i.e. a 3 dimensional array of logic gates to form a molecular version of ram. In addition, you could cram far more bits per gram of material used for the media. (I can't say per square inch because that would be misleading) In addition, storage capacity is not what our computers need more of : its performance (especially in accessing all those gigs of storage).

    • Re:Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )
      Atomic scale \b{is} essentially a vacuum. It's the same size as or smaller than any potential nasty air molecules!

    • Re:Eh? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by athlon02 ( 201713 )
      You forget, we don't just need more performance, we need smaller memory... If these people could make a type of RAM or non-volatile memory from this stuff then you could store your entire DVD collection, your entire CD collection, 1000's of photos from a 2 or 3Mp digital camera, tons of setup files for commonly used apps you have, etc, etc. all on a postage stamp sized media and still have plenty of room left over. Personally, I've been waiting for something like that for a LONG time. I mean, combine something like that with a PDA, cell phone, and firewire camera all at once, and that'd be quite an interesting device, that would be as small as the Sony Clie's I've seen, but rival the space of my desktop machine with an 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV, possibly with better transfer speeds too!!

      Yes, it's a lot of forward thinking and so forth, but I await the day when such things are common place and reasonably priced.

      And as for these guys working on this project, more power to them, if they can do it, albeit, I'm not holding my breath for it to happen any time soon.
    • I can't say per square inch because that would be misleading

      So say per cubic inch, or per cc.

      Superdense molecular storage & processing will be great, but we'll still find a way to fill it. :)

      ...reminds me of some short story where the geeks of the future had really fat bellies - not full of fat, but of their jelly-like personal storage matter.

      --

    • Re:Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jo-do-cus ( 597235 )
      This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage.

      This reminds me a bit of what they said to one of my ancestors, when he invented the wheel: "what good is that? What we REALLY need is something to fly, this 'riding' thing is just too slow and way too bumpy. Besides, where do you want to go anyway?"

      It's this kind of mindless (an really cheap) new-idea-bashing that really irritates me...
    • I wasn't imagining this as RAM, but ROM. Just from a quick calcuation (not trying to be amazingly accurate), I was able to determine that a CD or DVD sized disk could hold about 708 TB! Imagine being able to back up that much data on such a small area! Who cares if it has to be in a vacuum. That's a boatload of data storage.

      For RAM, I think your right. Once you can make a NAND gate and put them together the right way to make RAM, that's the future. However, if they could make a drive based on this technology, there are still many many practical applications.
    • This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage.

      Jebus, cut them some slack. I'll bet you would have said to Michaelangelo:
      "Yeah, I guess it is pretty and all, but it is on the ceiling. You have to crane your neck to really see it. What were you thinking?"

  • RAM, Harddrives, or even many processors.

    While I would hesitate to speculate on this kind of technology, if introduced, would mean an end to the way we think about storage and processing.
  • What are we supposed to read this thing with anyhow, X-Rays?

  • We lost the file server (Score:5, Funny)

    by SQL Error ( 16383 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:09PM (#4030392)
    Techie: Um, we've lost the corporate file server.
    Boss: You mean it crashed?
    Techie: No, it's working fine. We just can't find it.
  • At the bottom of the story, a key factoid: "Timeline: > 20 years" Holographic memory at 1 TB/cc will give this technique a run for its money on density and will probably be ready first.

  • Reminds me of... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by teetam ( 584150 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:11PM (#4030406) Homepage
    a juvenile idea/dream I had when I was a small kid to use the electron's spin (+half or -half) to store the same binary information. A single atom could store a lot more bits this way.

    Now, if I could only do it!!!

    • Um, that's what others are trying to do. They're called qbits (quantum bits).
    • ...use the electron's spin (+half or -half) to store the same ... information

      Doesn't the Pauli Exclusion Principle [gsu.edu] limit this seriously? After all, in every atom (of a given element), each electron must have certain preoccupied states... The only way to convey information by using ions (i.e. less, or more electrons for the same atom); and keeping electrically imbalanced material is a bit more difficult...

      • Not to metion Heisenburg's Uncertanty Principle.

        We cant really ever tell if the electron is spinning one way or another, the simple act of checking could make it do something else entierly.
        • The simple act of checking could make it do something else entierly.

          To fully realize the problem of this in everyday data storage, imagine your Weird Al MP3s transformed into Brittany Spears or N'Sync whenever you listen to them....
  • From what I gather in this article, this method uses the abscence or existance of gold molecules on a silicon surface to mimic the "1" and "0" of binary.

    First off, if this is widely used, won't this be expensive? I realize that these are gold MOLECULES, not bricks, but how much gold would it take to put a cubic inch in every PC in America?

    Secondly, I'm guessing that magnets won't mar these disks like they will current magnetic media. Granted, the drive will most likely have some magnetic parts, but perhaps this will make putting a subwoofer next to a computer case a little more safe. I realize that there's other stuff in a PC that can screw up if they come close to magnets, but at least if they screwed up I could take this meda and put it another machine without worrying about it being screwed as well.

    • Re:No magnets? What about costs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:27PM (#4030468) Homepage

      First off, if this is widely used, won't this
      be expensive?

      A small fraction of a cents in gold per 1000 terabytes. Your computer already has much more gold in it than one of these would require.

      I realize that these are gold MOLECULES,

      Gold ATOMS.
      • A small fraction of a cents in gold per 1000 terabytes.

        I'm curious; let's do the math:

        Atomic weight of Gold: ~197
        Price of Gold: $300 per ounce = $10.70 per gram
        Atoms per gram: 6.02e+23 / 197 = 3e+21
        Price per atom: $10.70/3e+21 = 3.57e-21 cents
        Price per Terabyte: 1/357000 cent

        This conclusively proves that the vast majority of the $100 you might pay for a 1-terabyte atomic storage unit goes to marketing overhead and sales commissions.

  • Other Equivalencies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jstockdale ( 258118 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:14PM (#4030421) Homepage Journal
    ...equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs...

    Also, you could store the contents of:

    149 200GB Fluid Bearing WD HDDs

    45850 CDs

    116400 256MB Flash Memory Cards

    298000 Zip Disks

    931300 32MB Memory Sticks

    OR!!! 20696000 1.44MB Floppies

    No offence guys, but come on. Post meaningful figures.

    Its actually 250 trillion bits per square inch.

    28.42 TB per square inch.

    Now thats impressive.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Quarks? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:18PM (#4030436)
    "from the quarks-coming-next dept."

    Dude, quarks have a hard enough time remembering where they are themselves! Why would you expect them to remember stuff for us as well?
  • equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material ...how much data could be fitter in one *cubic* inch!
    • how much data could be fitted in one *cubic* inch!

      that depends on the surface area of your cubic inch of material. this technique will only work on a surface.

  • Himpsel (Score:2, Informative)

    by Madtown PLT ( 87673 )
    Although the article doesn't mention his first name, "Himpsel" is Franz Himpsel. Check out his homepage here [wisc.edu].
  • This article [http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/OEG20020319S0029]
    talks about using a cell matrix which configure their neighbours at run-time,
    something like the game-of-life or a more generic turing machine sort of thing.
    This has lot of applications, including a highly programmable FPGA which
    is very simple to fabricate or even complicate circuiry.

    What really attracted my attention was the passage at the end:
    >Cell Matrix has been working with nanotechnology groups, hoping to forge a
    >new computing substrate from some type of atomic-level fabrication technique.
    >Macias was impressed with work at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in which a
    >matrix defined by erbium disilicide wires that address rotaxane molecules
    >has been proposed as an atomic-level route to massively dense FPGAs.

    Could this new research be an answer to these people ? Probably combining
    the two technologies, not only do we have a massive memory-device, but
    a massive computing device : Imagine an FPGA (or an ASIC) with a million
    times more density!
  • Are those small-size atoms, or normal-size atoms?

  • Why stop there? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dan Crash ( 22904 )
    They've settled on using gold atoms for 1s and empty space for 0s, like so:

    1 = gold atom
    0 = empty space

    (diagrams are fun)

    To do it, they just covered the whole silicon surface in gold atoms and removed one gold atom for each bit they wanted changed to 0. My first thought was, "Couldn't you repeat the process using other atoms, and increase the amount of information stored in the same space?" Like:

    10 = silver atom
    01 = copper atom
    00 = empty space
    11 = gold atom

    If so, you could double the amount of info stored in the same space. Not like someone else hasn't already thought this up, I'm sure, but I still thought it was interesting enough to post. Any physics majors care to comment on how far this process could go?
  • Seeing as I currently attend UW-Madtown, this holds a special place in my heart... oh yeah, I'm in the Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics program, so that might have something to do with it too. Anyways, because I tend to remember cool stuff like this going on here at UW [wisc.edu], I remembered another press release [wisc.edu] by us concerning Quantum computers. Yummy!
  • equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material

    sure it's a lot, but this is the limit for some time to come... I guess I was just expecting more from something on atomic scale.

    btw, 7,800, DVDs? come on, most people on here are literate, why not post some power of ten of bytes? btw, do I need to start with my explanation of how pointless measuring things in LoCs and HGs is yet, or wait till more of those are posted? (every damn time that storage comes up)

    on the other hand, this is a lot of space... guess pretty soon I'll just have discs labeled "Music", "Video", "Software" where the title does in fact mean all music that exists :) just don't tell [RI|MP]AA (actually, can we just call the RiMpa from now on? kind of has a nice ring to it)

    • actually, using rydberg states, they could get up to 10 bits per atom.
      so it might not be the limit.

  • karma whoring (Score:5, Interesting)

    by flollywebfrog ( 462849 ) <flolly@pooper.cc> on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:59PM (#4030609) Homepage Journal
    In 1959 Richard Feynman said that all the information accumulated in all the books in the world could theoretically fit in a cube 1/200th of an inch on a side.

    You can read the transcipt [zyvex.com] of the speech from when he made that prediction.

    Feynman worked on developing the atomic bomb [st-and.ac.uk], he won a nobel [nobel.se] in physics and is known as much for his scientific research as for his story telling [wwnorton.com].
  • this has for porn collecting?!?! It may soon become possible for the individual to afford enough storage, to have every single piece of pornography ever created by human beings since the beginning of time.

    I have no words.

  • Theoretical density issues (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ssyladin ( 458003 ) on Thursday August 08, 2002 @12:02AM (#4030617)
    The article states that the storage capacity of this new material/system is about equal to 7800 DVDs. Just to get nit-picky and technical, and to educate people some, this number will probably be lower.

    When DVDs are burned and read, you don't simply read raw data off. The information is, of course, encoded. The DVD (and CD for that matter) specification says to use Reed-Solmon encoding. Saving the long math, RS encoding is about the most advanced error-correcting scheme that can be implemented in low-cost hardware today. By encoding data this way, your DVD (or CD) can become fairly scratched, but still play. RS protects against multiple-point errors. However, there is a price to pay - for every ~33k byte block on a DVD, almost 5K bytes are used in the parity checks for the DVD. See this file for more gritty details about DVDs [disctronics.co.uk]. This means your 4.7GB DVD really holds about 5.48 GB of raw data.

    Now, why is this relevant? Harddrives use their own error correcting schemes too. Manufacturers have the luxury of creating their own encoding systems since they're the ones that provide the read/write mechanisms. You can't pull the platter out of one harddrive and stick it in another. Hard drives typically use CRC (cyclic redundancy check) encoding schemes. I know you have all gotten CRC errors on a floppy way back when - that's what it stands for. Anyway, CRC is much less efficent when you compare the protected data to parity information ratios. While I wasn't able to pull the actual numbers from the Internet or my old math books, you can find a discussion and sample math here [ciphersbyritter.com].

    When you boil it down and relate all this information to our magical harddrive, the maximum usable density of the data would hover between 85%, or 6630 DVDs/in^2, to 60%, a measly 4680 DVDs/in^2, of the listed capacity. This is all assuming that the ideal lab conditions are maintained for a consumer level product.

    As always, beware what the numbers tell you. However, if this can fly, then it would be an awesome step forward. Once you get Windows 2010 installed, you might even have a few Gig to play around with!

    • CDROMs use a large amount of raw data doing the same thing. A "700mb" CDROM actually holds around 805mb or so, but when used as a data cd that extra 100 goes to error checking.
    • But isn't that 4.7G they quote as capacity the space allowed by the encoding? IE: there's 4.7 of payload available from RSPC payload blocks.
      I don't think they quote the 4.7G as the RAW capacity of the disks, but the formatted capacity.
  • This type of memory may eventually become useful for storing vast amounts of data, but because the stability of each bit of information depends on one or a few atoms, it likely to be used for applications where a small number of errors can be tolerated. "I would not want to trust my bank account to a memory where a single atom could wipe out my savings," said Himpsel.

    Considering I don't store much money in my bank account, I sure as hell would risk my account being drained from $10 -> $0 along with the equal risk that its value will go from $10 -> 3.3E23 dollars. :)

    It's sure as hell better than to use a gigantic "Laser" to get lots of money.

  • It seems to me that over the past several years lots of research has been done on possible storage medium, yet the basic PC storage structure has yet to change. I remember reading on /. where someone figured out how to get 10 gig on a roll of scotch tape [slashdot.org], but I still have magnetic drives. Do you have rolls of scotch tape in your machine?

    • Magnetic disk storage hasn't gone away because the researchers have consistently beat Moore's Law: magnetic storage has been improving faster than silicon, just killing every proposed competitor. But these guys get no publicity because magnetic disks, for some reason, are seen as boring. In fact, IBM just sold off the lab with the world's leading magnetic disk storage researchers to Hitachi.

      Some day we'll run into the superparamagnetic limit and run out of tricks for working around it [extremetech.com], but there still appear to be a few more generations worth of gas in magnetic disk storage.

  • What is amazing is not the part about the data density, but the part about the way this memory is written. It is done by adding and removing individual groups of atoms. This means that, unlike today's hard drives, it should be possible to completely and totally delete data from the medium.

  • well... (Score:2)

    by haaz ( 3346 )
    pesky Madisonians, always coming up with crazy stuff like this. you gotta hate us. ;-)

    -- haaz, who is pretty sure he'll never come up with anything resembling this. (and lives in Madison.)
  • I lost my Library of Congress somewhere around here... please don't step on it...

  • seen this before (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aaw ( 122213 )
    Reading through the article, I noticed the following tidbit:
    Eventually, "instead of moving them, we [picked] up the atoms," using a scanning tunneling microscope, he said.
    This reminded me of an invention touted by one of my old professors at MIT. Low and behold, a search at the US patent office turned up this [uspto.gov] patent filed in 1994 for a high density dimer memory device which utilizes a scanning tunneling microscope
    . . .which in response to being placed in intimate contact with the lower atom of a selected dimer results in an interatomic bond which accommodates pulling the lower atom upward and thus pulling the upper atom downward so as to effect a change in the dimer angle.
    Looks like this isn't so novel after all.
  • With such density, doesn't it become more subceptable to EMP (electro magnetic pulse), sun flares, hot coffee, etc.?

    or will they be incased in lead or something?
  • Great, my desk is already cluttered with all my computer stuff, scanners, printers, hubs, etc. Where am I going to find space for a scanning tunneling electron microscope?
  • finally be able to burn off my entire MP3 collection onto one disk. :-)

    Actually, these miniturizations reminds me of a quote from a Scott Adams book (creator of Dilbert) (VERY MUCH PARAPHRASED SINCE I DON'T HAVE THE BOOK).

    "I see computers getting smaller and smaller until one day someone phones the president and tell him that the entire dept. of defence computer system is gone because someone sneezed and left a window open."
  • Any bets as to how long it will be before some lab announces they use atoms to store entire bytes?
    Their announcement will tell us that instead of that "old-fasioned moving of atoms" to represent 1s and 0s, the new technique changes the electron (or proton) count of an atom to represent up to one full byte of information in the same space.
    Hmm.... what elements are stable enough at that many charge levels to do such a thing?

    I do find it interesting that the access speeds and density of new memory technologies seem to be inversly proportional (and then some). We could probably write to a whole room full of conventional memory in the time it would take to full up a few bytes of this room-sized new memory.

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