Over the years, the scope of data storage from a consumer perspective has grown in scale. It has improved leaps and bounds with time. Smaller is better when it comes to data storage. The current scenario is that the customers are always on the hunt for the tiniest thing that could hold enormous data.
Now, IBM has revealed two breakthrough scientific achievements in the field of nanotechnology that could probably create building blocks for ultra-tiny storage devices. The IBM’s work will be shown in two reports to be published by journal Science.
First report:
The first report revolves around exploiting magnetic anisotropy, a property of atoms. Magnetic anisotropy has foremost technological significance as it determines the ability of an atom to store information. Until now, nobody had been successful in computing the magnetic anisotropy of a single atom.
The researchers have described a modus operandi for reading and writing digital 1s and 0s onto a union of atoms, or even individual atoms. If some substance is anisotropic (having diverse values when in different directions) and we are able to control its orientation, then the atom could represent the 1s and 0s of digital computing.
They claim that the further research could make it possible for an atom to reliably store magnetic information. The report is titled “Large Magnetic Anisotropy of a Single Atomic Spin Embedded in a Surface Molecular Network.”
Second report:
The second paper shows the ability to use a single molecule as a switch thereby imitating the performance of existing transistors. They have taken wraps off the first single-molecule switch that can function immaculately without unsettling the molecule’s external frame. Researchers have made single atom switches earlier too but, the molecules had a tendency to change shapes.
It would be a breakthrough step towards fabricating computing elements at the molecular scale, which are very smaller, faster and energy-efficient than the existing computer chips and memory devices.
Other than switching within a single molecule, the researchers also described that that atoms within one molecule could be used to change atoms in an adjacent molecule. One of the reasons that it’s possible is that the molecular framework is not disturbed. It might be possible one day to do the same thing to a fabric of trillions of atom-size switches in the future.
Challenges ahead:
The first and foremost challenge for the IBM researchers is to create a series of these molecules into a circuit and to find out how to network those together into a molecular chip. Although it’s still quite far from meeting realism, it has certainly raised hopes for the electronics industry, which has grown leaps and bounds over the recent years.
30,000 full-length movies onto an iPod:
Interestingly, IBM estimates that we could put 1,000 trillion bits of information in an iPod with atomic storage. The breakthrough could facilitate you to put 30,000 full-length or the entire YouTube content in a small device like iPod. This simply hints that the advancements nanotechnology could healthily improve the capacity of memory storage devices.
Future of molecular switches:
We can’t expect these breakthroughs to make their way into products in the very near future but, such devices could be used as future computer chips, storage devices, sensors, and an array of other applications. These molecular switches could one day lead to the birth of computer chips that would be as fast as the today’s supercomputers.
The advancements in the CMOS chips have reached its zenith and we can’t expect anymore from them. While the electronics industry is always on the look-out for the technologies to enhance the computer performance, we can say for sure that the modular molecular logic is going to catch all the attention shortly.
These two papers put forth by IBM give a clear indication that the computing technology is going great guns and could replace today’s microelectronics materials in the next decade.
Single-Atom Data Storage Picture Gallery
