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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StanX Long who wrote (64320)	6/12/2002 12:48:44 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

A New System for Storing Data: Think Punch Cards, but Tiny By KENNETH CHANG nytimes.com I.B.M. scientists say they have created a data-storage technology that can store the equivalent of 200 CD-ROM's on a surface the size of a postage stamp. Writing in the current issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, researchers at I.B.M.'s laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks. Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, an expert on molecular electronics at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Va., described the work as "incredible engineering." Still more remarkable, this new technology is a return to an obsolete one, at least in concept. Like computer punch cards — which were invented more than a century ago and went out of vogue in the 1970's, about the same time as slide rules — I.B.M.'s system stores data in a pattern of little holes. But I.B.M.'s holes are much, much tinier — half of a billionth of an inch across. While mechanical devices have steadily given way in recent decades to electronic ones that are faster, cheaper and more reliable, that trend may reverse at the molecular scale, where friction and wear and tear act differently. "Back to the future of mechanics," said Dr. Peter Vettiger, leader of the I.B.M. project, known as Millipede. Millipede has another advantage over punch cards: the holes can be closed up so that data can be rewritten over and over. Nantero, a start-up company in Woburn, Mass., is also taking a mechanical approach. Scientists there are making computer memory using nanotubes — rolled-up sheets of carbon graphite — that open and close like mechanical switches. "It's counterintuitive because people assume in a computer-type application that if you have moving parts, it will be too slow and also it will break," said Greg Schmergel, president and chief executive of Nantero. In electronic devices, data are stored in bundles of electrons, and as electronics shrink, the bundles contain fewer and fewer electrons. Smaller bundles of charge fall apart more easily. Hard disks run into similar problems as storage densities rise. Instead of electrical charge, hard disks store data in what is essentially a vast array of tiny magnets. But if a magnet is shrunk too small, vibrations of heat can make the magnet flip, destroying data.