IBM Gets Ready for Atomic Memory Breakthrough

IBM Corporation researchers announced on Friday that they successfully managed to manipulate individual cobalt atoms. This achievement may be regard as a technological breakthrough that will pave the way to atomic memory, where the bit-cells will hold just a few atoms.

The nowadays process involves heavy use of atoms. The densest memory material cannot go lower than one million of atoms per bit. IBM's engineers, however demonstrated last year that they can "convince" a single atom to store a bit - a process called magnetic anisotropy. The IBM scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to spread the electric current across the cobalt atom. The atom needs to be placed on an insulating monolayer with a thickness of one atom only.

The atomic force reacts interferes with the single cobalt atom and positions it randomly on the crystalline surface lattice. IBM has experimented with the process and discovered that the insulating layers won't do the trick for storing bits on the cobalt atoms. Thick layers of insulators, however, will work when it comes to the tunneling action of STMs. The scientists had to plan a different method of moving cobalt atoms into place.

The new method described by IBM involves using an atomic-force microscope (AFM) that has been developed by Gerd Binnig back in 1986.

"The main reason we wanted to learn how to use an atomic-force microscope for these operations is because we want to build magnetic structures on insulators that are too thick to be using an STM," said IBM scientist Andreas Heinrich. "We have found that the magnetic nanostructures we want to build require a thicker insulator. So we have begun using an [AFM], which does not require a tunneling current. This should allow us to build magnetic storage structures using very few magnetic atoms--say about five atoms per bit," Heinrich added.