Researchers Create Graphite Memory 10 Atoms Thick 135
CWmike writes "Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick. The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate. 'Though we grow it from the vapor phase, this material [graphene] is just like graphite in a pencil. You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper. If you were to place Scotch tape over it and pull up, you can sometimes pull up as small as one sheet of graphene. It is a little under 1 nanometer thick,' Professor James Tour said."
Pessimists? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pessimists? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Pessimists? (Score:5, Funny)
When cornered into a room by ninjas with nothing separating you from them but a door of wood, yes, thicker is better, but you will die regardless.
Re:Ninjas? (Score:5, Funny)
When cornered into a room by ninjas with nothing separating you from them but a door of wood, yes, thicker is better, but you will die regardless.
I think you are confusing ninjas with zombies, zombies have thick wood door shredding powers while a ninja is already in the room with you.
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So does John Wayne.
In one incident [imdb.com], Bond bet Wayne that they could stand on opposite sides of a newspaper and Wayne wouldn't be able to hit him. Bond set a sheet of newspaper down in a doorway, Wayne stood on one end, and Bond slammed the door in his face, shouting "Try and hit me now!" Wayne responded by sending his fist through the door, flooring Bond (and winning the bet).
Re:Pessimists? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure thicker is better. I remember hearing that churches in northern England replaced their super-thick oak doors with thinner planks riveted together in a cross-ply design, as this provided better protection against the axes of marauding Vikings.
Of course, Ninjas are a different proposition, and five minutes googling gives me no citation for the monastic plywood theory, so perhaps direct experiment is the only way to settle this one - just make sure you have plenty of emergency Pirates on hand for back-up and it should be safe enough.
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And catapults charged with monkeys!
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Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick.
640k of atoms should be thin enough for anybody!
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What's the tape for?
Re:Finally.. (Score:5, Funny)
Compression.
You fold the paper in half, and then tape the ends. Voila! Same information, half the size!
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Re:Finally.. (Score:5, Informative)
you should watch some mythbusters!
i think they managed 12 or 13 folds.
of course they started with a sheet of paper the size of a house and made the last fold with the help of heavy machinery!
eric
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I can do at least 25 folds.
Think accordian...
Re:Finally.. (Score:5, Informative)
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- But, but...
- ONCE AND FOR ALL!
(Also, about 37 foldings of it would make the paper so high to reach the moon).
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I think he means that $width_of_paper ** 37 >= $distance_between_earth_and_moon.
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Re:Finally.. (Score:4, Funny)
Every time you use an unspecified unit as the base in an exponential function, baby Newton cries.
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Yes; mm, cm, m, what are you measuring from? It could be the standard m, but then **37 it would get smaller, not larger.
Remember that in physical calculations, the unit is multiplied as well, not just the value. That's why acceleration is measured in "meters per second per second". If you differentiate one step further, it'll be "meters per second per second per second", and so on. If you don't specify the unit you're working with from the start, the values are *meaningless*.
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"$distance_between_earth_and_moon."
European or African moon?
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7 times - try it.
more than 7. [wikipedia.org]
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"A special kind of $85 toilet paper"
I'm glad she didn't use the regular $85 toilet paper. But outside of paper-folding experiments, who actually uses this? Does it really feel so much better?
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But outside of paper-folding experiments, who actually uses this? Does it really feel so much better?
It's so good, it actually does my calc homework for me.
Re:Finally.. (Score:4, Funny)
(Also, about 37 foldings of it would make the paper so high to reach the moon).
No problem. Just bend the resulting column in half 37 times.
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Space Exploration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Space Exploration (Score:4, Funny)
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10 Atoms thick? (Score:2, Interesting)
As per wikipedia,
Diameter range: 62 pm (He) to 520 pm (Cs) (data page)
Atom @ Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
It seems that the "thickness" of an atom varies. I've never understood why it is used as a unit of measure.
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In this instance, it seems highly likely that they're referring to atoms of carbon as those are the atoms which compose the material involved.
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In this instance, it seems highly likely that they're referring to atoms of carbon as those are the atoms which compose the material involved.
Interesting, let me see.
Carbon [wikipedia.org]
They say an atom of Carbon is about 80 pm (picometers) in diameter. A picometer is one trillionth (1/1,000,000,000,000) of a metre.
The sheets were roughly 5 nanometers in diameter. Graphene is a form of carbon.
Google tells me that 5 nanometers = 5000 picometers. Is my math off? It seems like there is a factor of 10 between how thick this stuff is and how thick Carbon is.
Re:10 Atoms thick? (Score:4, Informative)
A carbon atom has a covalent radius of about 80pm, but the atoms in sheets of graphite aren't bonded together. I don't know how far apart the atoms would rest, but it's going to be much farther than they would bond.
Re:10 Atoms thick? (Score:4, Informative)
Not that much farther apart, since the article says that the sheets are less than 1nm thick.
The figure he's quoting is a diameter, which would be the 2d dimensions of the sheet on the surface of the silicon they grew it on. It's the 5nm diameter that makes this exciting as a memory technology since that is very dense.
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The current things that are holding it back right now are probably mass distribution and reliability. Honestly though, it will take a lot more to convince me that we'll be using graphene-based memory chips someday.
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There are always applications found when something gets smaller (physically), bigger (storage), faster, or cheaper. It will be the same with this. When we reach the limit of storage density for flash memory, people will still want and expect bigger drives (capacity), but they won't want them to be physically bigger. Thus, we'll need some other technology to satisfy that market. There will be money in it, so somebody will find a way, whether it's graphene or something else.
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There are 10 atoms, so that's 800pm, which is close to 1nm yeah. :)
Which, uh, you figured out to much greater accuracy than I know how to in another post. Hehe.
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Whatever you say, I have no idea, I suck at chemistry. All I know is the article says it's 10 atoms thick. :)
Re:10 Atoms thick? (Score:5, Informative)
Google tells me that 5 nanometers = 5000 picometers. Is my math off? It seems like there is a factor of 10 between how thick this stuff is and how thick Carbon is.
One is talking about thickness, the other a diameter. The next paragraph of the article it says the sheets are a little under 1nm thick, and 10 C atoms would be around 800pm so that's a little under 1nm. The 5nm diameter would then be the other dimensions, these grown sheets are presumably circular. That dimension is important because that indicates how densely you could pack them on a surface.
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Thank you, that makes much more sense. I think I've got it now. Let me try explaining it with a holiday metaphore:
What they have created is, say, like a cookie. Each of these little cookies are 5 nanometeres in diameter. It's important to know that, because it lets us know how many cookies we can fit on our cookie pan. Each of these cookies are about 1nm tall. This is important because it affects how many of these cookie trays we could stack on top of each other in the oven.
I was having a problem conceptual
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The math isn't hard, but I have to take a shit so I can't do it right now.
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Which is why everything should be measured in Libraries of Congress.
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Just to give an idea for us to see the colossal difference between the 'everyday experience' and the atomic world.
There's really no difference between Hydrogen (Z=1) and Ununoctium (Z=118) when you peek at them from a dimension that is 10 billion times (say the inter-atomic distance is about 1 Angstroms and we live in the meters range) larger than those.
So if I cons up an 11 atom list ... (Score:1)
my Lisp program dies?
'(one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ...?)
*duck*
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You're doing it wrong, you should have counted from zero.
Who needs new graphite memory? (Score:5, Funny)
You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper.
You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Stone tablets (Score:2)
Yes, and they're called stone tablets. Luckily, computer researchers seem to be picking up on this, now that they're using graphite. Unfortunately it sounds like "etched in stone" will soon mean "subject to formatting".
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You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.
Your comment is clearly funny, but I wonder how these last compared to other forms of graphite.
The article doesn't seem to mention anything about this memory's reliability or wear -- even theoretical stuff would be fine considering that the technology is relatively new.
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You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory
You can prototype this new technology at home. All you need is a 4000H pencil, a laboratory-grade pencil sharpener, a microscope, and a steady hand.
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You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.
Please explain to me how my pencil can do the read part of r/w memory.
Re:Who needs new graphite memory? (Score:5, Funny)
You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.
Please explain to me how my pencil can do the read part of r/w memory.
Well look at you, you're all the fun at parties, aren't you?
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Please explain to me how my pencil can do the read part of r/w memory.
Well, if it's that hard and sharp, you could electrify the end and read the charge differences as you move in a raster pattern, moving across atoms and atom-free zones on a substrate layer. Try it by writing "IBM" on silicon in individual atoms, then using the same method to scan the area. Would probably be a destructive read, but you could probably do it. You could keep the excess atoms in a bit bucket.
NERD = Nerd Emulating Recursive Datum
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"Details of the implementation have been left as an exercise to the reader" isn't a particularly good way to get R&D funding.
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Try it by writing "IBM" on silicon in individual atoms, then using the same method to scan the area
"Details of the implementation have been left as an exercise to the reader" isn't a particularly good way to get R&D funding.
(sigh) sorry, this was done long ago by IBM labs using a scanning tunnelling microscope. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20360.wss/ [ibm.com] I thought that was fairly well known by now.
For the rest of you, apologies for the explanation.
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So.... (Score:5, Funny)
no more microwaving your hard drive to aid in data destruction.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure that microwaving your hard drive only aids in microwave destruction.
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Common Rule of Microwavery: (Score:1)
after 10 seconds of microwaving.
Overkill; five or six seconds are almost always enough to make a smoking mess out of most anything worth putting in there, but only when the item in question should never be microwaved in the first place(tm).
Which is to say; "food (and so on) should be taken to, at least eleven(tm) , (..and possibly beyond.)
- You're welcome.
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No amount of hammertime will completely erase a HDD platter. I could imagine that if surface plamsons occur on the platter while exposed to 700 watts of destruction, the EM field gradients would be so strong that the sticky bits would just evaporate. Microwave radiation isn't high-frequency enough to directly cause this, but with all that power you're damn sure to do more damage than a hammer will
And opening a HDD is trivial, as all geeks know. :)
Graphene for write-only memory (Score:5, Funny)
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The combination of the graphene on one end of the stick and the pink cylinder on the other promises to allow nearly unlimited read-write capabilities
Are you sure you don't mean "unlimited write-delete capabilities"? If you start with write-only memory, and then add the ability to delete it, you still can't read it.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_Only_Memory [wikipedia.org]
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I have even heard of a company called Enron that employed a bulk-erase mechanism to vastly speed up the delete cycle, it was called the Arthur Anderson, but it self-destructed
Graphene balloons (Score:2, Funny)
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I've worked with graphite before in a lab (we used it as a substrate for STM [wikipedia.org].
Using scotch tape to pull up layers of graphite must be a common technique: we used it too. There are many kinds of graphite. Using crystalline graphite (found in nature), you could use the tape to pull up a nice thin layer.
Being around improvised solutions using common materials was one of my favorite things about lab work.
Vaporware (Score:5, Funny)
"...we grow it from the vapor phase..."
Literally, vaporware.
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I guess soon (Score:5, Funny)
the RIAA et al will be wanting royalties off every pencil sold and Canada will have a pencil tax?
She told me size doesn't matter... (Score:5, Informative)
Reading the articles, it appears the size is nice, but it isn't the biggest deal here. They're projecting a bit smaller than 10nm, which is twice as small as next-generation flash drives that "projections show ... will reach its limit of 20nm by around 2012."
The biggest deal here seems to be power management.
What distinguishes graphene from other next-generation memories is the on-off power ratio - the amount of juice a circuit holds when it's on, as opposed to off. "It's huge - a million-to-one," said Tour. "Phase change memory, the other thing the industry is considering, runs at 10-to-1. That means the 'off' state holds, say, one-tenth the amount of electrical current than the 'on' state."
Current tends to leak from an "off" that's holding a charge. "That means in a 10-by-10 grid, 10 'offs' would leak enough to look like they were 'on.' With our method, it would take a million 'offs' in a line to look like 'on,'" he said. "So this is big. It allows us to make a much larger array."
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Er, I'm don't get that, since if this is going to be memory then you have to account for the fact that it's possible every single bit could be a 1. And current certainly leaks from the higher-voltage 'on' state.
"Though we grow it from the vapor phase" (Score:2, Interesting)
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Interesting. That is how artificial diamonds are formed too... vapor forming around a diamond seed in a vacuum chamber.
Chemical vapor deposition. I don't think it's in a vacuum though. A vacuum (by definition) is an absense of matter. Chemical vapour deposition works (IIRC) by having a gas (such as methane... i.e. matter) which is heated and then doing magic to seperate carbon from diamond deposits.
Graphene/Graphite (Score:5, Informative)
Graphene has been studied extensively in the last few years. Carbon Nanotubes were on the rise (which are just rolled up sheets of single layer graphite) but the current difficulties to manipulate those to create devices staggered their advance. Graphene ( or Graphite for that matter) is a little easier to manage because it's like a 2 -D sheet and it can be laid/printed off a substrate more easily.
The current major problem of graphene is the lack of a sizable band-gap which is typically required for semiconductor modulation. We may see a breakthrough in the following years if people figure out a way to overcome this barrier.
Finally... (Score:2, Funny)
Altered Carbon (Score:2)
I wonder if that means I can get a heap of this and create a stack [wikipedia.org] now...
GrpA
How would you dispose of such a thing? (Score:2)
Securely destroying such a drive before disposing of it may be a challenge...
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Not really, you'll just need to try and take a very important test with it.. it'll break almost immediately..
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Not really, you just heat it over 200 degrees celcius, you can get that on most home ovens, you just by burning it.
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Really? 200 degrees C is only 392 degrees F.
That's very interesting, but... (Score:2)
...after reading the article I'm still wondering what the storage mechanism is.
OK, so it's made of graphene, but how does it remember anything, and how do you read and write it? It's like launching a new kind of engine, and only specifying what it's made of.
Anyone got a more detailed link?
We are actually given a lot more hints about how the main competitor works, albeit only by virtue of its name, not journalistic thoroughness.
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It doesn't matter - Moore's Law ended this week. (Score:2, Funny)
Get over it. There will be no faster computers now that the US Govt has bailed out the DRAM industry. Innovation like this is illegal!
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Budweiser?
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holy crap! I am setting up a graphite memory chip manufacturing plant at home tonight. I just need to stop by staples and pick up some supplies !
Make sure to go to the right Staples. The article says you need 10 thick Adams to get a flash.