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Thank you Re: FYI Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Powers Of 10: Interactive
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[Often thought of as "Blue Sky" this is one of many stories on this topic. ...ED]
And:Chris M. wrote:
Thursday, November 13, 2003 Posted: 10:06 AM EST (1506 GMT)
SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- A new memory technology promises to
store mored ata at less cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular
consumer gadgets including digital cameras, cell phones and portable music players.
The magical ingredient isn't smaller transistors or an exotic material
cooked up by the semiconductor industry. It's a plastic.
Researchers at Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP Labs
developed the memory, technically a hybrid that contains a plastic film, a
flexible foil substrate and some silicon. The findings appear in the journal
Nature on Thursday.
Unlike flash memory found in consumer devices, the new technology can be
written to only once, though it can be read many times. It acts in that
respect like a non-rewriteable compact disc. But the new memory, which
retains data even when there's no power, won't require a power-hungry
laser or motor to read or write, and promises more capacity.
"For music or photographs, it's actually an advantage to have something you
can't rewrite," said Warren Jackson, one of the paper's co-authors and
scientist at HP Labs. "Even in accounting, it would be quite useful if you
have a trail of files that you can't erase."
The goal is to make the technology fast enough to store video.
It also could become one of those items people need to keep buying
because, once they fill up a card, they'll need more.
Because production would be simpler, costs for consumers should be lower
on a per-megabyte basis than today's flash memory, researchers said. Yet it has
the potential to store considerably more data.
"We're looking at a different way of manufacturing that we think will
eliminate clean rooms and be a lot less expensive in the end," said Craig
Perlov, an HP Labs scientist and another co-author of the research paper.
The new memory, which could end up in a small format similar to Compact
Flash or SD Cards, doesn't use transistors to store information. Instead, bits
are written when a strong current passes through a polymer fuse, causing it to
blow and change its conductivity. Smaller currents determine what junctions
are opened or closed -- which translates into the digital world's ones and
zeros -- to retrieve the contents.
Because manufacturing wouldn't require vacuum chambers or high temperatures,
layers could be stacked atop each other, like a layer cake. Such stacking has yet
to be attempted.
"There are no critical alignment steps and no lithography," said Stephen
Forrest, a Princeton scientist and study co-author. "Most importantly, it's
not on a crystalline substrate so that we can stack these memories very
tightly. We can use three dimensions to create the memory."
Other companies are pursuing polymer-based memory. Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
recently bought the startup Coatue, which is working on a reprogrammable memory.
"They're aiming at harder targets," said Vladimir Bulovic, a professor of
computer science and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. "They're trying to work on rewriteable memory, which is the
second step. The (write-once, read many times) memory is the first obvious
step."
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New memory has become a hot topic of research since current flash memory is expected
to run into trouble in coming years. As the dimensions get smaller, the transistors leak more
electricity and require more power to operate.
Bulovic, who was not involved in the research, said several more steps must
be worked out before such memory becomes commercially available. But
the results are promising, he added.
"It's a real technology," he said. "And that's a tremendous difference to
anything else that's been shown in the molecular electronics field."
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