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My Next Purchase: 12,800,000 Gigabyte Thumbdrive
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| Yan |
| quote: | Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.
Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies.
Now imagine if this could be achieved by combining a computing principle that was popular in the 1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide. Science fiction? Not exactly.
Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric dipole moments. These dipole moments are times when the material gains a charge, in this case an electric one. For example, the Earthıs magnetic field generates a dipole moment that causes compasses to face north, but the stability of ferroelectric charges has been a problem for researchers.
Until recently, it was difficult to stabilize ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. This was because the traditional process of screening the charges was not completely effective. However Dr. Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University and his research colleagues and the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new and slightly unusual mechanism stabilizing the ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials:
surrounding the charged material with fragments of water.
Ferroelectric materials are compounds that possess electric dipole moments; similar to the magnetic dipole moments of Earthıs magnetic field that causes a compass to always point north. Until recently, it was difficult to miniaturize ferroelectric materials because of problems with screening.
All ferroelectric materials, even Spanierıs wires that are 100,000 times finer than a human hair, need to be screened to ensure their dipole moments remain stable. Traditionally this was accomplished using metallic electrodes, but Spanier and his team found that molecules such as hydroxyl
(OH) ions, which make up water, and organic molecules, such as carboxyl (COOH), work even better than metal electrodes at stabilizing ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials, proving that sometimes water and electricity do mix.
³It is astonishing to see that molecules enable a wire having a diameter equivalent to fewer than ten atoms to act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element,² said Spanier, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel.
If commercialized, ferroelectric memory of this sort could find its way into home computers, rendering traditional hard-drives obsolete. The extreme capacity offered by such a device could easily put a room full of hard-drives and servers into a jacket pocket, but this idea can be applied to other computer components, such as ferroelectric RAM.
RAM is necessary in a computer because it stores information for programs that are currently running. As this news release was written, RAM stored the words in a file. Because RAM can transfer files faster than a hard-drive, it is used to handle running programs. However most RAM is volatile, and if the computer loses power all the information in RAM is lost. This is not the case with ferroelectric memory.
Ferroelectric memory is non-volatile, so it is entirely possible for files to be stored permanently in a computerıs RAM. Applying nano-wires and the new stabilization method to existing ferroelectric RAM would deal a double blow to hard-drives in size and speed.
Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe offrom the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires. In the interim, Spanier and his colleagues will continue to investigate the role of molecules on ferroelectricity in nanowires and to develop nano-scaled devices that exploit this new-found mechanism.
Support for the research at Drexel is from the Army Research Office and at Harvard and at Penn from the National Science Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Dreyfus Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Center for Piezoelectric Design. |
Source: http://www.drexel.edu/univrel/datel...1&f=20060508-01
You know you want it. o.o |
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| Yan |
| quote: | Originally posted by JohnPaullino
Interesting |
LOOOOL.
Stuff 100 of these in your XBOX. :p |
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| Orbax |
What could you possibly do with larger hard drives :rolleyes:
oh right, ultimate collections. |
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| Boomer187 |
| hmm, so they can make a ton of room, they just havent thought of a way to write the info or read it....not a bad start. |
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| JohnPaullino |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yan
LOOOOL.
Stuff 100 of these in your XBOX. :p |
Thats what i was thinking, lol |
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| emc^2 |
| Finally! I could fit all my pr0n on just two of these sticks! Can't wait to get it... |
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| NebulousQ |
| quote: | hydroxyl (OH) ions, which make up water
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This statement right here makes me doubt the veracity of this article. OH- ions do not make up water, water is made up of the H2O molecule. OH- ions usually only appear in water when the water is a solvent in a solution.
The only way the OH- ion could be said to make up water would be that the H2O molecule breaks up into the H+ and OH- ions when in solution. And that is really stretching it. |
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| placebo |
| quote: | Originally posted by emc^2
Finally! I could fit all my pr0n on just two of these sticks! Can't wait to get it... |
+1 |
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| placebo |
| will this work on windows 3.1 ? |
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| Belgian Bonzai |
| quote: | Originally posted by NebulousQ
The only way the OH- ion could be said to make up water would be that the H2O molecule breaks up into the H+ and OH- ions when in solution. And that is really stretching it. |
Maybe you know, but neutral (standard) water has 1 OH- for every 10^7 water molecules [hence, neutral is pH=7, pH=-log_10(concentration H+)]
One mol (I'd have to check atomic masses, but something along the lines of 32 grams) contains 6x10^23 atoms, that's even more fun to dream about to have every atom carry one bit. Even further into the future of course. |
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