Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made 249
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."
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.
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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.
Re:DNA-memory and computer bio-viruses (Score:5, Funny)
Re:DNA memory (Score:4, Insightful)
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Three terrabytes of storage isn't going to do you much practical good if it takes two hours to find and recover the bit of information you want.
There is a large class of data storage requirements that could be met with a two hour seek time. As long as the throughput is there, it could replace tape drive type storage applications, for example.
Or extremely large databases, which may be 99.995% write. Archival storage would be another example, if the medium proved hardy enough.
While it won't replace RAM or hard drives, I would LOVE to see extremely high density storage of this type.
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A further set of issues, irradiation. Especially at such a small siz
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?
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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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?
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160 kilobits = _ 10,000 _ traditional 16 bit words
____________ = _ 20,000 _ bytes
____________ = __ 3,333 _ MavisBeaconWords (avg 5char/word w singlespace word separators)
____________ = ______ 2.5 typewrittenPages (apx)
Meanwhile, when saved to the desktop on a WinXP NTFS box, a Word97 document containing one character requires 19 kilobytes of storage. So:
bytes (from above): 20,000
less W97 overheads: 19,455 (19 KB less the 1 byte of content in the test file)
__________________ -------
_____________
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Sorry have to finish it (Score:3, Funny)
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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!"
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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.
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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)
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It's more fun to browse through a volume of it on a rainy day than it is to hyperlink all over wikipedia.
I've been around comupters too long (Score:2)
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.
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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?
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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
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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)
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Its a question of weight ratios
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
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No, The *real* real question is... (Score:2)
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?
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Give the summary credit for stating the following: "100 gigabits per square centimeter." That is a fine way to measure storage density.
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The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over.
I mused to myself, "Cool, now we can measure storage in USDoIs!" I fully expected to see the very posts you are complaining about after that.
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.
M&Ms (Score:2)
Some NPR page has the volume of an M&M at 0.636cm^3. So this new ditty will store 7.95 GB in the space of an M&M.
Plain.
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A chocolate M&M, or a peanut M&M? They're not the same size!!! See perhaps the Skittles or Smarties units would have been more appropriate, since these are of uniform size.
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Yeah, thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
d12
Re:Yeah, thanks (Score:4, Funny)
*stings on drums*
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Give us furlongs. (Score:2)
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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...
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This is an overly simplistic explanation, I'm sure.
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This is why I have always loathed immunology, heh heh heh... take your CD4's and CD8's and CD16's and CD"n"'s and shove em. And if your short on lube I can give you a whole lot of complement and interleukins to ease the pain...
Says nothing about the size of support circuitry (Score:4, Funny)
Which words? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Which words? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computing) [wikipedia.org]
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RTFS! (Score:2)
Therefore, 160 kb divided by 2000 English words, and assuming that we encode them in a 6-bit encoding, gives us over 13 letters per word, or call it 12 when allowing for punctuation.
Alternatively, assuming ASCII encoding, that still gives us exactly 10 characters per word, or call it 9 when allowing for punctuation.
Wikipedia claims that the average English word length is 5 plus one punctuation character [wikipedia.org].
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Actually now I have a look at the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] topic I fear I'm opening a can of worms.
"Most dense"? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Maybe you've forgotten, but when you apply the word dense to a single object, it refers to the object's density, not how many of them are packed into a given area. Given that many early ICs were made with lead, and that these are made with silicon, they're not anywhere near the densest ever, and to be clear, they're actually not the most densely packed ever either (thanks to 3d FRAM such as made
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: (Score:2)
Re:Very few details (Score:4, Informative)
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These are good questions!
I can only answer a couple of them at the moment.
Is this volatile or non-volatile memory?
It is non-volatile... so long as nobody sneezes.
What size word are they using?
This should have been obvious from the context of TFA. They are using MavisBeaconWords. These have the equivalent length of 5 ascii characters plus one spacer character, so the conversion is 1 MavisBeaconWord = 6 bytes (assuming ascii encoding).
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.
tracking nuclei as memory (Score:2)
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First of all, my lasers are mounted on sharks' heads, so they are much more powerful.
Second, we strip away all those pesky electrons by completely ionizing the material which oops, won't keep still all of a sudden... uhh nevermind
Something doesn't add up... (Score:2)
160000 / 2000 = 80
One word = 80 bits?
I've never heard of an 80-bit word architecture.
Unless of course they're speaking of an MS Word architecture, in which case even the byte count would be bloated
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Are you sure they don't mean '80 / 8 = 10' - an estimate for average English word length? Pretty hight though, I think it's usually about 6 (counting the space, even).
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I had not either. But I had a bug in the Linux port of my code and discovered that deep inside the floating point processor of 32 bit intel chips, there are 80 bit registers and all intermediate calculations are accurate upto 80 bits and final result gets truncated and stored in 64 bit double words. I had to fiddle with compiler flags to disable the "extra" accuracy. A tree I was building was using 80 bit accurate key during insertion and 64 bit accurate st
Obl. football field? (Score:2)
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Is that an English football, or an American football?
Sorry everybody, I just couldn't resist.
Must control these Montyesque fingertappings...
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Or, how many AIDS infected monkeys would it take to randomly type one of Shakespeare's plays during a football game?
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.
For some reason these analogies do not impress me (Score:2)
LOCs? (Score:2)
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So someone with AIDS and a low white cell count now has to worry about loosing their vocabulary, among other things?
if it were an iPod... (Score:2)
Dense??? (Score:2)
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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
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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