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Pratap Ravindran

CDs nudged over floppies, and now there's even better news for memory freaks. Read on...

DO you remember the floppy disk which (or so legend had it) was so named because it invariably flopped whenever you needed it most? Remember the sheer sense of the relief that you experienced when the replacement of floppies by compact disks became viable?

Well, if you could hold your partying for a minute and listen up, there's more good news headed your way...

Researchers from Princeton University, New Jersey, and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alta, California, say they have discovered the key to a technology that will allow conducting plastic to be used as a memory with the potential to store a megabit of data in a millimetre-square device. They're talking about a device that's 10 times denser than the magnetic memories currently in use. And they're claiming that this device is likely to prove fast and less expensive than the silicon-based chips currently used in mobile devices — hand-held computers, cell-phones and MP3 players and the rest of it — but which can be used only for permanent storage as it can't be re-written. And then again, it can be read several times and will retain data without power because it doesn't require a laser or a motor to read or write.

The new technology the researchers are talking about is radically different from silicon technologies such as the widely used Flash memory because it's made of plastic, a foil substrate and some silicon. The chip basically sandwiches a conducting polymer called PEDOT and a silicon diode between two perpendicular wires. The plastic polymer conducts electricity at low voltages... but operates as a semiconductor at higher voltages.

According to the researchers, the new memory doesn't use transistors to store information as Flash does. Instead, bits are written when a current passes through a polymer fuse, causing it to blow and change its conductivity.

The concept is novel, to say the least, as it involves the application of a lower voltage to PEDOT to change its resistance to the conducting material and to nudge it into a state of high resistance that will enable the storage of digital data. As no vacuum chambers or high temperatures will be used in making the chip, layers can be piled up, one on top of the other. The technology, unlike flash in which silicon wafers are subjected to batch processing, will use the wafers as a substrate laid down one layer at a time.

Simplification of the production process is likely to prove central to the viability of the plastic memory chip by crashing the cost of memory use on a per megabyte basis for customers.

The new technology has advantages other than lower cost going for it. Most of these advantages are related to the fact that it doesn't permit re-writes. By way of illustration, a PEDOT-based rig could provide protection against virus hackers by ensuring that they will not be able to erase their IP addresses. This is possible because PEDOT, instead of rewriting over existing data, creates a static section for incoming data. The integrity of data on documents is also pretty much guaranteed, a feature that is bound to be of considerable local interest to people in India. The talk in global hardware circles is that the technology breakthrough has come at a point of time when Flash memory is about to bounce off the limitations imposed by the steady shrinking of the dimensions of various devices. Smaller memory space spells transistor leaks, which, in turn, spell more electricity. However, the jury is still out on this one: Intel has come out with a new transistor which pretty much takes care of the leakage problem and Flash technology is currently at a process node of the .11 micron with a clear roadmap for the next decade or so.

Meanwhile, the UK-based Nanomagnetics has announced that it can boost computer hard drive capacity a hundredfold by using a common protein, apoferritin, to fabricate nano-scale magnetic particles.

The company claims that it can deploy apoferritin, the primary molecule in which iron is stored in the body, to create a material comprising magnetic particles that are a few nanometres in diameter. Each particle can store a bit of information — and they can be packed onto a disk drive at much greater density than is possible using current hard disk manufacturing methods.

That's the good news. The bad news is that while this technology will undoubtedly take hard drive manufacturers from nano scale to magnetic recordings, it may be a while before the kinks are ironed out.

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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