New Chip Has Enough Memory to Store a Whole Library

Over the past year, solid state drives (SSDs) have become faster but also more capacious than previous solutions, and hard drive platters have reached a higher density than before. This has actually allowed the latter type of storage units to achieve capacities of up to 2TB, quite impressive compared to several years ago. A North Carolina State University scientist, however, seems to have no qualms about getting quite near to completely shattering the hype that current technologies have achieved.

Apparently, Dr. Jay Narayan, a materials science and engineering professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU), managed to create magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information each and are capable of polarity reversal, which can signal binary ones and zeroes. This let him and his team put together a one-square-inch chip that could store one billion pages of information.

According to the researcher, the nanodots are magnetic sensors, single, defect-free crystals created during thin-film growth by laser disposition. They are integrated into semiconductors and can be as small as 6nm in size. An inch is equal to 25,400,000 nanometers, which corresponds to 4.23 million 6nm nanodots. This means that 17,921 billion such nanodots can fit into a square-inch chip. For consumers, this is the equivalent of 2.24TB of data. One can only imagine what sort of colossal capacities storage devices based on this technology can actually achieve.

The only thing that this new storage technology is missing is a means of actually writing and reading the data from the chip. According to Narayan, a method based on lasers could be used, though there aren't many specifics. Most likely, the boffin is searching for a way to access and write nanodot data at speeds comparable to that of SSDs, otherwise the new technology may not gain traction, even despite the obvious, and huge, benefit in storage space. Fortunately, they are, at least, supposedly easy and, thus, cheap to make.