X-Message-Number: 31693
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 20:12:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: 
Subject: New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years

[Too bad, our brains weren't built like this.]

New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years

ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) - Packing more digital images, music, and other data
onto silicon chips in USB drives and smart phones is like squeezing more 
strawberries into the same size supermarket carton. The denser you pack, the 
quicker it spoils. The 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today's 
memory cards has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. And the 
electronics industry needs much greater data densities for tomorrow's iPods, 
smart phones, and other devices.


Scientists are reporting an advance toward remedying this situation with a new 
computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than 
conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion 
years. Their discovery is scheduled for publication in the June 10 issue of the 
American Chemical Society's Nano Letters, a monthly journal.


Alex Zettl and colleagues note in the new study that some of today's 
highest-density experimental storage media can retain ultra-dense data for only 
a fraction of a second. They note that William the Conqueror's Doomsday Book, 
written on vellum in 1086 AD, has survived 900 years. However, the medium used 
for a digital version of the book, encoded in 1986, failed within 20 years.


The researchers describe development of an experimental memory device consisting
of an iron nanoparticle (1/50,000 the width of a human hair) enclosed in a 
hollow carbon nanotube. In the presence of electricity, the nanoparticle can be 
shuttled back and forth with great precision. This creates a programmable memory
system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it 
back using conventional computer hardware. In lab and theoretical studies, the 
researchers showed that the device had a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte 
per square inch (a trillion bits of information) and temperature-stability in 
excess of one billion years.


Journal reference:


Begtrup et al. Nanoscale Reversible Mass Transport for Archival Memory. Nano 
Letters, 2009; 9 (5): 1835 DOI: 10.1021/nl803800c

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