Every day, modern society creates more than a billion gigabytes of new data.
To store all this data, it is increasingly important that each single bit occupies as little space as possible. A team of scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University managed to bring this reduction to the ultimate limit: they built a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom. “In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp”, says lead-scientist Sander Otte. They reached a storage density of 500 Terabits per square inch (Tbpsi), 500 times better than the best commercial hard disk currently available. His team reports on this memory in Nature Nanotechnology on Monday July 18.
Feynman
In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman challenged his colleagues to engineer the world at the smallest possible scale. In his famous lecture There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, he speculated that if we had a platform allowing us to arrange individual atoms in an exact orderly pattern, it would be possible to store one piece of information per atom. To honor the visionary Feynman, Otte and his team now coded a section of Feynman’s lecture on an area 100 nanometers wide.
Sliding puzzle
The team used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), in which a sharp needle probes the atoms of a surface, one by one. With these probes scientists cannot only see the atoms but they can also use them to push the atoms around. “You could compare it to a sliding puzzle”, Otte explains. “Every bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that we can slide back and forth between these two positions. If the chlorine atom is in the top position, there is a hole beneath it — we call this a 1. If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is therefore on the bottom, then the bit is a 0.” Because the chlorine atoms are surrounded by other chlorine atoms, except near the holes, they keep each other in place. That is why this method with holes is much more stable than methods with loose atoms and more suitable for data storage.
Codes
The researchers from Delft organized their memory in blocks of 8 bytes (64 bits). Each block has a marker, made of the same type of ‘holes’ as the raster of chlorine atoms. Inspired by the pixelated square barcodes (QR codes) often used to scan tickets for airplanes and concerts, these markers work like miniature QR codes that carry information about the precise location of the block on the copper layer. The code will also indicate if a block is damaged, for instance due to some local contaminant or an error in the surface. This allows the memory to be scaled up easily to very big sizes, even if the copper surface is not entirely perfect.
Datacenters
The new approach offers excellent prospects in terms of stability and scalability. Still, this type of memory should not be expected in datacenters soon. Otte: “In its current form the memory can operate only in very clean vacuum conditions and at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K), so the actual storage of data on an atomic scale is still some way off. But through this achievement we have certainly come a big step closer”.
This research was made possible through support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW/FOM). Scientists of the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Portugal performed calculations on the behavior of the chlorine atoms.
Learn more: Smallest hard disk to date writes information atom by atom
The Latest on: Data storage
[google_news title=”” keyword=”data storage” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Data storage
- Best 5 TB Hard Disks: Top Picks For Heavy Storage Needson May 9, 2024 at 10:30 pm
Go ahead and immerse into a new world of high-capacity storage with this article which lists the top 5 TB hard disks available online. From fast data ...
- TerraMaster announce its latest 8-Bay 10Gbps 2+6 RAID Hybrid Storage Solution — D8 Hybridon May 9, 2024 at 9:30 pm
TerraMaster has just launched the newest D8 Hybrid, a 2+6 RAID hybrid storage solution with slots 1 and 2 supporting RAID 0/1/JBOD configurations, while slots ...
- Dell Chooses Wasabi For Cloud Storageon May 9, 2024 at 2:40 pm
Cloud storage provider Wasabi, which touts its ability to provide cloud-based data storage at a fraction of the cost of that of Amazon Web Services, Thursday unveiled a new strategic agreement to ...
- Atlanta considers data center ban along Beltline, near transit stopson May 9, 2024 at 2:00 am
Atlanta City Council will consider whether to add data centers to the growing list of developments and businesses banned along the popular Beltline trail loop.
- Molham Aref Creates RelationalAI As AI Coprocessor For Data Cloudson May 8, 2024 at 6:50 am
RelationalAI provides a cloud-based relational knowledge graph management system, with probabilistic processing, to make developing data applications easier.
- Negotiating the evolving data storage landscapeon May 8, 2024 at 1:00 am
How Pure Storage can smooth the journey of keeping up with constant change. Elizabeth Coles . Wed 8 May 2024 // 08:00 UTC ...
- Panasas Is Now VDURA for AI and HPC Data Storageon May 7, 2024 at 1:12 pm
Long-time HPC data storage company Panasas (formed 1999) is now Vdura. The new brand "signifies the company’s shift to a software company operating under a software subscription-based business model," ...
- Huawei sees future in data storage businesson May 7, 2024 at 8:26 am
Huawei’s president of European enterprise Willi Song and president of IT product line Peter Zhou outlined ambitions for its data storage enterprise.
- 3 Storage Devices Stocks to Watch as the Industry Reboundson May 7, 2024 at 8:16 am
The Zacks Computer-Storage Devices industry players are well-poised to gain from solid momentum in cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), auto, connected devices, virtual reality and Artificial ...
- The impact of edge computing on data storage architectureon May 7, 2024 at 12:08 am
E dge computing has come to light as a transformative technology in the scope of data storage architecture, presenting innovative solutions to tackle the challenges caused by the ...
via Bing News