Atomic scale memory

[fafalone]

Physicists at the University of Wisconsin have created a way to manipulate individual silicon atoms in a lattice to express binary digits. 1 silicon atom is surrounded in a cell of 20 atoms the keep the target one from interacting with others. It is the presence or absense of this central atom that is read/written by a scanning tunneling microscope as a bit. This is compared to other means of storage: 20 atoms for a bit in this system, and 32 atoms (64 for 2bp+backbone). The replication rate for DNA at room temperature is 600bp/s, but silicon could theoretically be read at 10^7 bits/s. Density compared to conventional disks is also talked about. The highest density ever achieved in conventional hard disks is 100Gbits/in^2, while silicon would permit 250Tbits/in^2, which fulfills Feynman's prediction all the information in all the books could be contained on a cube 2/100ths of an inch in size.

 

Here's UW's press release and here's the paper

[Michael77]

it is becoming more aparent that scientists are begining to understand how the brain works after all.......even if they don't realize it......all they have to be able to do now....is figure out a way to apply binary code to subatomic particals and with element and binary cobinations they can store lifetimes of information in a tomato.....or even a metalic bar...but that is too far in the future I think....

[fafalone]

Almost there. We can already store (this article) and process (quantum computing, we're up to 7qubits now) information using single atoms. With the approach in this article, a memory chip the size of a tomato could store all the books ever written.

[Michael77]

Yep....it would definitly be cool......the trick will come when they try to move away from organic storage and use sub atomic storage in stuff like metal alloys and such.....