Random Accesses

Researchers at General Electric claim to have made a key breakthrough in optical data storage that could lead to commercial discs holding the equivalent of 100 DVDs within three years. The new technology is based on the physics of holograms, which enable information to be packed far more densely than with established recording formats. A new device will be needed to play these discs but this will be compatible with established formats like CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs, say the US-based team.

Invented over 50 years ago, holograms are now widely deployed as authentication tags, and can be found everywhere from credit cards and passports to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. These futuristic surfaces can be generated in photosensitive materials by applying two coherent light beams: an “object” beam carrying information about a material’s structure; and a reference beam that records the desired pattern on the hologram. The resulting 3D interference pattern is usually stored as changes in refractive index of the recording material, which can be viewed when the material is illuminated by daylight.

Source: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/39565

A Lancaster University physicist has been given a Royal Society Brian Mercer Feasibility Award to support his work exploring the development of a novel type of computer memory based on the use of quantum dots.

'Conventional silicon-based computer memory will soon reach its limit, so we really need to find a solution with better performance,' said Dr Manus Hayne.

Flash memory, which is commonly used in USB drives, is a non-volatile memory based on charge-storage in an electrically isolated ‘floating gate’ placed between the conductive channel used for readout and the ‘control gate’.

Flash has been the memory technology driver since 2003, taking the leading position from dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which is the capacitive-based memory used in PCs.

However, Hayne adds, the performance of Flash is rather mediocre. Charging up the floating gate requires pushing charge across the SiO2 barriers that isolate it, making writing very slow and, eventually, damaging it.

Hayne's quantum dot (QD) memory, on the other hand, is a new memory concept that avoids the intrinsic problems associated with pushing charge through an insulating barrier.

Source: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/311501/Quick+thinking.htm

Toshiba Corporation today announced the prototype of a new FeRAM -- Ferroelectric Random Access Memory -- that redefines industry benchmarks for density and operating speed. The new chip realizes storage of 128-megabits and read and write speeds of 1.6-gigabytes a second, the most advanced combination of performance and density yet achieved. Full details of the new FeRAM was presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2009 (ISSCC2009) in San Francisco, USA.

The new FeRAM modifies Toshiba's original chainFeRAMTM architecture, which significantly contributes to chip scaling, with a new architecture that prevents cell signal degradation, the usual tradeoff from chip scaling. The combination realizes an upscaled FeRAM with a density of 128-megabit. Furthermore, a new circuit that predicts and controls the fluctuations of power supply supports high-speed data transfers. This allowed integration of DDR2 interface to maximize data transfers at a high throughput at low power consumption, realizing read and write speeds of 1.6 gigabytes a second. In developing the new FeRAM, Toshiba broke its own record of 32-megabit density and 200-megabit data transfers, pushing performance to eight times faster than the transfer rate and density of the previous records and the fastest speed of any non-volatile RAM.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news153420638.html

Recent advancements might finally open the door to a new storage technology that will merge optical and magnetic technologies, leading to high capacity storage devices reaching speeds thousands of times that of existing storage technologies, while boasting improved reliability.

In 2006 Dr. Daniel Stanciu (then working on his Ph.D.) and Dr. Fredrik Hansteen discovered a way to use light to change the polarity of a magnet. Even more impressive was the fact that it only took an extremely short laser pulse of about 40 femtoseconds (an unimaginably short time equal to one millionth of a nanosecond) in order to switch a magnet. According to Stanciu, back in 2006, conventional wisdom in the field considered this feat to be impossible. Even Stanciu’s Professor did not believe the young researcher until the latter demonstrated the switch in the lab.

Source: http://thefutureofthings.com/news/6186/laser-hard-drives-in-the-making.html

Another step towards quantum computing – the Holy Grail of data processing and storage – was achieved when an international team of scientists that included researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to successfully store and retrieve information using the nucleus of an atom.

In a paper entitled: “Solid-state quantum memory using the 31P nuclear spin,” published in the October 23 issue of the journal Nature, the team described an experiment in which exceptionally pure and isotopically controlled crystals of silicon were precisely doped with phosphorus atoms. Quantum information was processed in phosphorus electrons, transferred to phosphorus nuclei, then subsequently transferred back to the electrons. This is the first demonstration that a single atomic nucleus can serve as quantum computational memory.

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2008/10/23/news-bits-about-qubits-scientists-store-and-retrieve-data-inside-an-atom/