New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years

Packing more digital images, music, and other data onto silicon chips in USB drives and smart phones is like squeezing more strawberries into the same size supermarket carton. The denser you pack, the quicker it spoils. The 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today’s memory cards has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. And the electronics industry needs much greater data densities for tomorrow’s iPods, smart phones, and other devices.

Scientists are reporting an advance toward remedying this situation with a new computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years. Their discovery is scheduled for publication in the June 10 issue of the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters, a monthly journal.

Alex Zettl and colleagues note in the new study that some of today’s highest-density experimental storage media can retain ultra-dense data for only a fraction of a second. They note that William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book, written on vellum in 1086 AD, has survived 900 years. However, the medium used for a digital version of the book, encoded in 1986, failed within 20 years.

Read more . . .

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Tags: computer memory, densities, digital images, doomsday book, gigabits, Innovation, life expectancy, memory cards, memory device, nano letters, one billion years, smart phones, storage media

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Science Digest / Science Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.