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Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jan 24, 2007 06:37 PM
from the size-matters dept.
from the size-matters dept.
adamlazz writes "The most dense computer memory circuit ever fabricated, capable of storing around 2,000 words in a unit the size of a white blood cell, was unveiled by scientists in California. The team of experts at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who developed the 160-kilobit memory cell say it has a bit density of 100 gigabits per square centimeter, a new record. The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over."
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Press Conference Transcript (Score:3, Funny)
Dr. Tufnel: Look... densest memory circuit ever, so dense you can't even see the data on it, so dense it's never been used.
Reporter: [points his finger] It's never been used
Dr. Tufnel: Don't touch it!
Reporter: We'll I wasn't going to touch it, I was just pointing at it.
Dr. Tufnel: Well... don't point! It can't be used.
Reporter: Don't point, okay. Can I look at it?
Dr. Tufnel: No, no. That's it, you've seen enough of that one.
DNA memory (Score:3, Interesting)
DNA-memory and computer bio-viruses (Score:4, Insightful)
And have a stray biological virus get in and alter my computer's DNA-based memory?
I wouldn't want to think what the computer would use to alter its DNA-based memory fast enough to be useful, let alone what would happen if it escaped and latched onto an organism.
Parent
Re:DNA-memory and computer bio-viruses (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:DNA memory (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:DNA has fault tolerance. (Score:5, Informative)
I just can't see biological systems ever achieving the kind of consistency we expect from computers. Do we really want to go to the good old days of running a computation several times and taking the average result as the answer?
Parent
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Not in Microsoft Word format. Maybe ASCII.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Microsoft Word say:
3 pages
8 paragraphs
111 lines
1338 words
6782 characters
8114 characters (with spaces)
Parent
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
So if the "The" at the beginning of the bolded opening sentence were dropped, the USA would instantaneously be the best place on earth?
Parent
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh it's quite short really, and it goes:
"Sod you, you limey bastards - we've had enough! We're not giving one more cent to your lunatic King, and you can tell him we are personally going to chop down all our trees, so THERE!"
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry have to finish it (Score:3, Funny)
Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Public Service Announcement (Score:4, Informative)
Stop opressing me, I can post where ever I wanna!
But seriously, using the estimate from wikipedia: "It is estimated that the print holdings of the Library of Congress would, if digitized and stored as plain text, constitute 17 to 20 terabytes of information", we can use google to calculate how many such chips would be required to store the US Library of Congress:
Enter into google: (20 terabytes) / (160 kilobytes) = 134 217 728
Now, with some reasearch into White Blood Cells [iscid.org], we learn that a normal human has between 7000 and 25,000 white blood cells in a drop of blood. So going with a conservative estimate of 10,000 white blood cells per a drop of blood, we could store the Library of Congress in
134 217 728 / 10 000 = 13 421.7728 drops of blood.
That's not very accurate, let's try to get a better estimate. Wikipedia to the resque:
Again, with a conservative estimate of 7 x 10^9 white blood cells per liter, we get
134 217 728 / (7 * (10^9)) = 0.0191739611
Entering into google 0.0191739611 liter to centiliter, we get
0.0191739611 liter = 1.91739611 centiliter
In other words, storing the whole Library of Congress using these chips would take about half a shotglass of blood.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness, I know how long a London Bus is, I know that an elephant is pretty heavy, I know roughly how much shelf space the Encyclopedia Britannica takes up and I know tall buildings can be quite tall.
But I have no real concept of how big a white blood cell is, or how much some thousand words (how many thousand? It's out my mind now that it's off the screen...) really is.
For all I know, the hard drive in my computer could be storing 600 birthday cards per germ already and I wouldn't have a clue.
Anyone care to quote how fast the Concorde went in Ford Escorts per millisecond? [google.co.uk] (the link will give you a good start)
Parent
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Funny)
So you want to know the LoC / metric pachyderm of this technology? I'm not sure, but don't go by what it says on the box, they define a kilo-Library of Congress to be 1000 LoCs, not 1024.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, this page [techtarget.com] estimates LoC at 10 terabytes, which works out to 81920 gigabits. According to the article, a bit density of 100 gigabits per square inch means that you'd need 819.20 square inches to store the Library of Congress.
According to this page [iucn.org], an elephant can reach 11 feet tall, or 132 inches, and 30 feet long, or 360 inches. According to this page [galumpia.co.uk], an elephant can reach 6'4" wide, or 76 inches. That's a dimension of 132 x 360 x 76 inches, or 3,611,520 square inches — assuming cubic elephants (there's a phrase you don't hear every day!).
Given these figures, a reasonable first guess would be that you could fit approximately 4,400 Libraries of Congress into an elephantine memory circuit. Or, if you prefer to work with more manageable quantities, 4.4 megalocs per kilophant.
How long before Google add LoCs to their calculator?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
assuming cubic elephants
You know, if elephants were cubic, they would be much easier to store and transport.
Which reminds me of an old joke: a dairy farmer wanted to increase the milk output of his cows. A friend suggested he ask the local university for advice, and he eventually found a physics professor who was willing to help. After a few weeks of waiting, the farmer got a call from the professor, who claimed to have found a way to triple the milk production! The farmer raced to the university, whe
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, there's the high end Unix crowd that would go crazy over that stuff, but trying asking SGI or the Itanium department how profitable it is to cater to that market nowadays.
Also, don't forget that Windows hasn't had a major upgrade since 2001. Windows upgrades are a large factor in how much RAM people need.
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
COMPARISONISTICS! (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, none of my vague comparisons fit...
WAIT! How many angels can dance on it? That one is for small stuff, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Give the summary credit for stating the following: "100 gigabits per square centimeter." That is a fine way to measure storage density.
Re:COMPARISONISTICS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... gigabits per square centimeter is a horrible storage density metric. We need to deal with volume - unless we suddenly moved to a 2-dimensional universe - and even volume isn't perfect. For a drive platter do you only count the magnetic medium, or the underlying material as well? What about the space between platters or the read/write mechanism? I could have great storage density, but it wouldn't do me much good if I needed an entire scanning tunneling microscoope to read it.
Parent
Yeah, thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
d12
Re:Yeah, thanks (Score:4, Funny)
*stings on drums*
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The "size" of a red blood cell is around 7 micrometers thick, and around 30 micrometers in diameter IIRC... can't remember white blood cells but they're quite a bit bigger.
How does this compare to DNA bit density? (Score:4, Informative)
Biology still wins. But nanotechnology creeps ever closer year by year...
Says nothing about the size of support circuitry (Score:4, Funny)
Which words? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Which words? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Which words? (Score:4, Funny)
Since they're red blood cells, which are essential to life, to the universe, and everything, I would say it's going to 42 bits to a word.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Very few details (Score:5, Insightful)
- Is this volatile or non-volatile memory?
- What size word are they using?
- If non-volatile, what kind of endurance can be expected? What about data retention? It doesn't matter how small the memory is if the data only lasts 5 minutes. (Yes, I'm sure there would be applications even for that, but you get the point.)
- What are the write and read times?
- If volatile, does the data need to be refreshed continuously, or will it hold its value as long as power is applied?
- How much power is required for different operation?
Okay, so maybe I was expecting too much. But they could've at least given some of the most basic details, like word size (damned marketing dept!).Re:Very few details (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Yahoo! I can multiply! (Score:3, Informative)
The Yahoo! News article got the figures wrong. To get only 2,000 words (a computer term, not a linguistic one) out of 160-kbits they'd have to be 80-bit words. The article at Technology Review [technologyreview.com] has better maths and more information to boot.
Research abstract (Score:5, Informative)
A 160-kilobit molecular electronic memory patterned at 1011 bits per square centimetre [nature.com]
Jonathan E. Green1,4, Jang Wook Choi1,4, Akram Boukai1, Yuri Bunimovich1, Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin1,3, Erica DeIonno1, Yi Luo1,3, Bonnie A. Sheriff1, Ke Xu1, Young Shik Shin1, Hsian-Rong Tseng2,3, J. Fraser Stoddart2 and James R. Heath1
The primary metric for gauging progress in the various semiconductor integrated circuit technologies is the spacing, or pitch, between the most closely spaced wires within a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) circuit1. Modern DRAM circuits have 140 nm pitch wires and a memory cell size of 0.0408 mum2. Improving integrated circuit technology will require that these dimensions decrease over time. However, at present a large fraction of the patterning and materials requirements that we expect to need for the construction of new integrated circuit technologies in 2013 have 'no known solution'1. Promising ingredients for advances in integrated circuit technology are nanowires2, molecular electronics3 and defect-tolerant architectures4, as demonstrated by reports of single devices5, 6, 7 and small circuits8, 9. Methods of extending these approaches to large-scale, high-density circuitry are largely undeveloped. Here we describe a 160,000-bit molecular electronic memory circuit, fabricated at a density of 1011 bits cm-2 (pitch 33 nm; memory cell size 0.0011 mum2), that is, roughly analogous to the dimensions of a DRAM circuit1 projected to be available by 2020. A monolayer of bistable, [2]rotaxane molecules10 served as the data storage elements. Although the circuit has large numbers of defects, those defects could be readily identified through electronic testing and isolated using software coding. The working bits were then configured to form a fully functional random access memory circuit for storing and retrieving information.
Also, an interesting bit from the very end of the paper:
Many scientific and engineering challenges, such as device robustness, improved etching tools and improved switching speed, remain to be addressed before the type of crossbar memory described here can be practical. Nevertheless, this 160,000-bit molecular memory does indicate that at least some of the most challenging scientific issues associated with integrating nanowires, molecular materials, and defect-tolerant circuit architectures at extreme dimensions are solvable. Although it is unlikely that these digital circuits will scale to a density that is only limited by the size of the molecular switches, it should be possible to increase the bit density considerably over what is described here. Recent nano-imprinting results suggest that high-throughput manufacturing of these types of circuits may be possible29. Finally, these results provide a compelling demonstration of many of the nanotechnology concepts that were introduced by the Teramac supercomputer several years ago, albeit using a circuit that contained a significantly higher fraction of defective components than did the Teramac machine4.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Still fairly impressive if you ask me. But, more importantly, memory circuit says "flash" to me (I can't be bothered to read TFA). That'll make for a very large stick, or a massive internal flash drive - the latter really appeals to me, as seek time can be a real killer and flash effectively doesn't have on
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If we could increase the data-density of RAM by a few orders of magnitude (without sacrificing access times, of course), we could avoid one of the main bottlenecks in modern computers