Nanotube Non-Volatile Memory Entering Production

hovermike writes "Nantero and LSI Logic are expected to announce that nanotube non-volatile memory will be going into production, at least as far as the NY Times is concerned. Nanotubes have been discussed previously, Nanotube Applications..., and Buckminsterfullerene..., but I'm certainly surprised something like this has moved into production this quickly. Could this be the ultimate 'bubble' memory?" Reader hovermike writes "The press release can be found at the Nantero website. I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life."

Life's worth of pictures

[sjonke]

"I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life."

And to losing them all in one fell swoop?

Re:Quickly?

[laigle]

True, but there is a great deal of difference between developing the material and developing the application. Just making the nanotubes doens't allow you to make a memory card out of them. I would be rather interested in how much research has been put into memory-holding, write/read times, memory density, interference and the like before deciding to switch over to NRAM.

No way

[nizo]

I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life.

I don't empty my 8MB card to the computer often enough already, so if the card never got full the family pictures wouldn't get seen by anyone else until I died and someone else inherited my camera.

Re:Press release, sans PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

why companies would release text information exclusively in PDF format

Perhaps they can't figure out any other way to digitally sign the document?

Re:Toxicology

[Cat_Byte]

It seems that a 1GB nano-tube based memory card should last the rest of your life

And 640K of memory should be enough for anybody ;)

Re:Another new memory

[Mz6]

"There will come a day when DRAM will go away and we'll be left with extremely fast and simple NVRAM for main memory and possibly even archival storage"

This is obviously not the right way if you are worried about passwords being found years later on hard disks, as was mentioned in previous slashdot article.

5Mbit or 5Mpixel?

[tji]

I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life

5Mbit pictures? 5Mb = 640KB, so you can already store 6,250 pictures on a 4GB microdrive. Not a lifetime's amount, but quite a long time at my rate of picture taking.

I suspect he meant 5 Mpixel, which would be much bigger than 640KB each.

Re:what about it's environmental effects

[Carl T]

however, what if it has properties similar to asbestos?

Cheap, well-insulating, durable, and rather bad for construction workers and others who shred and inhale lots of it? I think how the hell is anyone gonna inhale it?! pretty much sums it up. Disposing of these little nanotubes should be easy enough if you can burn them, I would think. That leaves the question of how to disassemble the chips in an orderly fashion, but I figure that's pretty much the same problem you're faced with when recycling electronics today. Not that people don't just dump their old machines in the trash, but anyway.

I'd worry a lot more about the flame retardants and other goo that's still being used in enormous amounts in computers. There's a half-year old computer in my office, and ever since it got here I've had to open the window every morning, or the fumes from it make me cough. Not sure what exactly the computer is giving off, but whatever it is I don't think it's particularly good for me.

Re:Toxicity?

[th3axe]

From what I remember, the concern about nanotubes (as well as other nano-materials) is that we don't have a great deal of experience with them yet. Motor oil has been around for quite some time and isn't a truly "new" material, while nanotubes are. The unique properties of the material brings with it both benefits and possible problems. Given our history with cool, new stuff, it would be wise to see what possible issues might arise.

I'm no Luddite, but I don't think it's a bad idea to work through the lifecycle of this type of material. If it decays, how does it decay? What happens to it or its components when it does decay? Can we just just toss it into landfills or does it count as hazardous waste? Lots of questions, maybe they've been answered, but I don't recall there being a great deal of study on it.

That said though, it's a cool thing that we're gonna see this stuff in real life.

I think the article is misleading

[SteroidMan]

It says nothing about being ready to mass-produce the technology. In fact, the way I read the article, the partnership is so that they can try to create any sort of working process that is even remotely cost-effective and works reliably. This is a long way from commercial viability. Without this partnership, Nantero has no ability to fab this kind of technology at any volume on their own. It sounds as if they are using the joint partership to go hunting for funding. I don't even see a concrete product announcement

Space is never enough

[galo_2099]

If you have space to take all your 5 Megapixels photos for the rest of your life, you'll start taking 50 Megapixels photos. If you still have more space, you'll start making videos.
Just bring the space, and we'll use it!

Re:Press release, sans PDF

[Grishnakh]

Can't you just convert it with pdf2ps, then ps2ascii, and read it from that?

PDF is an open standard with a published spec... it can't be that hard to make a screenreader for it.

Re:Press release, sans PDF

[Anonymous Cow herd]

Er... PNG, GIF and JPEG all have published specs... I have yet to see a screen reader that will look at one and say "It's a picture of a bird". :-P

All smartass-ness aside though, this is a big problem with PDF's, is that alot of them don't use text inside, but rather scanned images of text. This makes PDF accessibility a huge issue.

Re:Life's worth of pictures

[Analogy Man]

This would not necessarily preclude a backup/disaster recovery strategy.

Is having data spread across 1,000,000 floppy disks...or 1,000 CD's more secure from loss or corruption?

I should think not.

If a backup can be generated in a short period of time, have persistance (not degrade over time tape media) and be re-writable ... a compact media like this would be fantastic.

Has no one ever seen a Tech Press Release?

[Tristan7]

The article says develop semiconductor process technology. This is MARKETING people. Nothing has happened, no technology has even passed between the two companies. It's a deal between the companies to both share the expenses of brining this to market. But the reason it's short on details is becaues there aren't any.

Re:Press release, sans PDF

[Grishnakh]

There's PDFs and there's PDFs. It's a convenient document format for many uses. It's great for distributing documents that have been generated on a word processor or typesetting program, and for documents like these, there should be no problem converting it to plain-text. PDFs have also been used a lot for scanned text. However, this is a totally different case than the former. There's an existing document on paper, and someone wants to digitize it so it can be distributed on the web. They could turn it into a big pile of GIFs, PNGs, or JPGs, or they could make it into one PDF. Do you have a way to screen-read scanned images? If not, then you have absolutely nothing to complain about, because in this case PDF is only serving as a convenient encapsulation method (it provides thumbnails, bookmarks, table of contents, etc.). So if those people didn't use PDF, they'd have to provide a zipfile of PNGs or something, which would totally suck.

Maybe you should try OCR software. What are you going to complain about next? That digital cameras and digital photos aren't accessible to blind people?

Re:Toxicity?

[Goldenhawk]

Last *I* heard, eating the silicon chips from inside a flash disk was ALSO harmful to my health. Just like drinking the various chemicals used to produce them.

Okay, okay, it's a bit more complicated than that, but I have a hard time getting worried about nanotech just because it's nanotech. After all, the nanotech will be embedded within carrier material, just like all the current chips. Just as with most modern technology, the manufacturing process isn't necessarily safe for bystanders, and requires careful attention. Same for the disposal process.

Nothing new here.

OOPS!

[ca1v1n]

Ummm... I wish my tennis racket was made of nanotubes. I could sell it and never work again. Take the article with a huge grain of salt, because they've confused nanotubes with graphite fiber.

Re:Another new memory

[shfted!]

Blanking data on an extremely fast medium is, well, extremely fast. It would be quite feasible to zero out all discarded information where it is too demandind on slow hard disks today.

Re:Press release, sans PDF

[QuantumRiff]

I'm not blind, by my co-workers little boy is. I've spent some time with him, trying to get a 10 year old blind boy on the internet. That is difficult enough.. The real bitch is that many government offices, local, state, and fed, only produce PDF's for things. That is their standard. There are ways to convert PDF's, mostly involving linux, an OS that I love, but Linux is definately not set up for the blind. Now, try to imagine researching laws on discrimination of the handicapped, when all the government docs are published in PDF, which is not handicapped accessible.

My main point I'm trying to make is that we have other tools to do it, why choose PDF? Take a few minutes, and do some reading on accessability standards for the web, and then look at some sites that follow them. For example, OSU [orst.edu] I'm not a student there, but I do do some research on their site occasionally. They have been pushing accessability on everything pretty hard at that college. That web page is so much easier for everyone to navigate now, becuase it isn't designed with just marketing in mind, but with everyone. It loads faster, less crap, more consistant, and every image has an ALT tag description. by making it accessable, it works easier for everyone. And the hard part for them was just changing the mindsets of people to consider these things.

PDF files are great in some applications, such as the manual for my motorcycle. But a press release as a PDF? Why not just post a 5MB flash as your homepage, so that it looks the way you want it to? You could, but its waaaay overkill..

When did SRAM become non-volatile?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Carbon nanotube memories could sharply improve the performance of cellphones, laptop computers and other electronic devices. Like today's flash and SRAM memories, carbon nanotube designs can maintain data when power is turned off, an advantage over dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, memory chips, which must constantly be refreshed. But it can operate considerably faster and on less power than flash memory, and is much cheaper and more compact than SRAM."

That's funny, I don't remember SRAM being able to magically keep its state after the power was removed.

I can't stand it when writers for major press entities can't get their facts straight about basic technologies, like what the static in SRAM actually means. Of course, this is the NY times, so what should we expect?