Scientists build worlds smallest storage device

Scientists build worlds smallest storage device - Yahoo! News UK
Scientists are claiming a major breakthrough in quantum computing after managing to store information inside the nucleus of an atom. Skip related content

The team from Princeton University, Oxford University and the U.S. Department of Energy used both the electron and nucleus of a phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon crystal. Both the electron and nucleus behaved as tiny quantum magnets capable of storing quantum information.

"The electron acts as a middle-man between the nucleus and the outside world, " said John Morton, a research fellow at Oxford's St. John's College.

"It gives us a way to have our cake and eat it--fast processing speeds from the electron, and long memory times from the nucleus."

While memory has been stored in a nucleus for just one tenth of a second the team managed to keep the information accessible for nearly two seconds. Researchers studying quantum computing recently calculated that if a quantum system could store information for at least one second, error correction techniques could then protect that data for an indefinite period of time.

"Nobody really knew how long a nucleus might hold quantum information in this system," said Steve Lyon, leader of the Princeton team.

"With crystals painstakingly grown by the Berkeley team and very careful measurements, we were delighted to see memory times exceeding the threshold."

 

[NormCameron]

Hi Les, I guess two seconds IS a long time in Quantum physics. Before we laugh too loud, who'd ever heard of solid state hard drives five years ago? Or quad core CPU's?

 

[echrada]

Exactly Norm, all great things have to start small. Think of the human being!

 

[NormCameron]

Les, as an addendum to your story, hard drives are getting smaller too :-

According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves ‘flying’ an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The ‘flying head’ they’ve created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using ‘this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful’ and that ‘it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today’s disks.’ But read more…

The figure on the left describes this new “high-throughput maskless nanolithography using plasmonic lens arrays. a, Schematic showing the lens array focusing ultraviolet (365 nm) laser pulses onto the rotating substrate to concentrate surface plasmons into sub-100 nm spots. However, sub-100 nm spots are only produced in the near field of the lens, so a process control system is needed to maintain the gap between the lens and the substrate at 20 nm. b, Cross-section schematic of the plasmonic head flying 20 nm above the rotating substrate which is covered with photoresist. c, Schematic of process control system. The laser pulses are controlled by a high-speed optical modulator according to the signals from a pattern generator. The writing position is referred to the angular position of the disk from the spindle encoder and the position of a nano-stage along the radial direction.” (Credit: UC Berkeley)
This plasmonic nanolithography process has been developed under the supervision of Xiang Zhang, UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering, and several members of research lab. He also worked with David Bogy, another UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering and member of the Computer Mechanics Laboratory.
Here are additional details provided by Liang Pan, a UC Berkeley graduate student working on this project. “With optical lithography, or photolithography, you can instantly project a complex circuit design onto a silicon wafer. However, the resolution possible with this technique is limited by the fundamental nature of light. To get a smaller feature size, you must use shorter and shorter light wavelengths, which dramatically increases the cost of manufacturing. Also, light has a diffraction limit restricting how small it can be focused. Currently, the minimum feature size with conventional photolithography is about 35 nanometers, but our technique is capable of a much higher resolution at a relatively low cost.”
So how did UC Berkeley researchers overcome this diffraction limit of light? They chose a different approach. “They took advantage of a well-known property of metals: the presence at the surface of free electrons that oscillate when exposed to light. These oscillations, which absorb and generate light, are known as evanescent waves and are much smaller than the wavelength of light. The engineers designed a silver plasmonic lens with concentric rings that concentrate the light to a hole in the center where it exits on the other side. In the experiment, the hole was less than 100 nanometers in diameter, but it can theoretically be as small as 5 to 10 nanometers. The researchers packed the lenses into a flying plasmonic head, so-called because it would “fly” above the photoresist surface during the lithography process.”
Already, similar flying heads have been developed in Bogy’s Computer Mechanics Laboratory. “‘Flying heads support the phenomenal advances in data storage in hard disk drives,’ said Bogy. ‘They enable the fast speeds and nanometer accuracy required in this potentially new approach to semiconductor manufacturing.’ The researchers said the flying head design could potentially hold as many as 100,000 lenses, enabling parallel writing for even faster production.”
This research work is available from Nature Nanotechnology as an advance online publication under the name “Flying plasmonic lens in the near field for high-speed nanolithography” (October 12, 2008).
Here is the beginning of the abstract. “The commercialization of nanoscale devices requires the development of high-throughput nanofabrication technologies that allow frequent design changes. Maskless nanolithography, including electron-beam and scanning-probe lithography, offers the desired flexibility but is limited by low throughput. Here, we report a new low-cost, high-throughput approach to maskless nanolithography that uses an array of plasmonic lenses that ‘flies’ above the surface to be patterned, concentrating short-wavelength surface plasmons into sub-100 nm spots.
For more information, here is another link to the full article (PDF format, 5 pages, 552 KB), from which the above figure and its caption have been extracted.
Finally Zhang expects that an industrial implementation of this technology should appear in the next five years. And if the numbers shown above don’t talk to you, here is analogy provided by Zhang. “The speed and distances we’re talking about here are equivalent to a Boeing 747 flying 2 millimeters above the ground. Moreover, this distance is kept constant, even when the surface is not perfectly flat.” Really impressive…
Sources: University of California at Berkeley news release, October 22, 2008;

Improving chip density by a factor of 100 | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com

 

[rasmasyean]

You guys might like these articles about the discovery of the final passive element in electrical engineering theory.
Slashdot | Memristor — 4th Basic Element of Circuits
EETimes.com - 'Missing link' memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

 

[NormCameron]

"
develop ... computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there's no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. ... create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain. As far as I know, human brains don't retain much information when the power is turned off and there's usually some trouble after the power is restored. Furthermore, I'm not sure how power-down information retention relates to pattern-matching abilities.
But what to I know, I had my brain off last night." LOL

 

[rasmasyean]

"
develop ... computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there's no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. ... create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain. As far as I know, human brains don't retain much information when the power is turned off and there's usually some trouble after the power is restored. Furthermore, I'm not sure how power-down information retention relates to pattern-matching abilities.
But what to I know, I had my brain off last night." LOL

It’s like a flash memory, but they hope to make it faster. If you can replace the RAM in your computer with this stuff, in theory, you can turn it off…then when you turn it back on, the “memristor RAM” would have been exactly where you left it after you turned it off.
It’s not “sleep”. It’s “off” (no electricity at all).

Furthermore it’s analog (not digital). A normal flash bit would store lets say, 0 and 1. That’s 2 states.
A memristor “bit” would store depending on the resolution they achieve lets say 0, 1, 2,…9. That’s 10 states. In this case that would be 5 X the information on one location.

The theory of the brain is that your neurons form connections to act as “memory”. To simplify it, let’s assume you start playing tennis. As you practice, your neurons form “neural pathways” that become stronger in recognizing the “pattern” of hitting the ball, etc. The computer scientists represent the connection strength with a number between 0 and 9. The more connections your brain has to enable “hitting the ball”, the more accurate you can do it over and over again. But let’s just say simply that you go from 0 (noob) to 9 (pwner). And when you pop a beer, the alcohol molecules block some connections so you become a 4. And if you are an alcoholic, eventually it will scramble all your connections confusing your brain and killing off enough neurons that you become a permanent 1.

Here is a basic description of that theory.
Neural network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[NormCameron]

Well I'm not going to play any tennis after that, that's for sure. Seriously rasmasyean, thanks for the info. That is quite a staggering piece of technology with serious implications in all sorts of areas of technology. Think of what this would mean to Robotics , for example.

 

[rasmasyean]

Well I'm not going to play any tennis after that, that's for sure. Seriously rasmasyean, thanks for the info. That is quite a staggering piece of technology with serious implications in all sorts of areas of technology. Think of what this would mean to Robotics , for example.

Like this?
http://datacore.sciflicks.com/terminator_2/sounds/terminator_2_cpu.wav

Actually, there has been work on this already in some forms. One of the most impressive is supposed to involve a fighter aircraft where it gets shot up.
In theory, the aircraft can still fly if it lost part of it's wing, engine parts, whatever, in many damage situations. The problem is that it will take too long for the pilot to learn how to fly this damage plane before he has to eject in hostile teritory and or crash and die. So the Neural network computer "learns" how to fly this "modified plane" faster (based on the sensor input) than any human can, and adapts to the pilot controlling the plane.

I imagine it works something like this:
A missle blows up a part of your plane so in this case it just so happens that if you...
1) hold your stick 23 degrees off to the left
2) enable between 40-60% only of throttle
3) do a gradual 15 degree dive and climb at invervals of 3 seconds

...then you can go straight and take yourself back to base.

Well, I made that up but you can imagine by the time the pilot figures that out under pressure and all, he's toast. Instead the computer does all of this while you are just holding your controls like you would normally do.

There have been sitings of planes missing large chunks of itself back from battle in Isreal if you search arround... That can be what lets them do it.

Here's one...
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b5a79a516c

 

[dmex]

You guys might like these articles about the discovery of the final passive element in electrical engineering theory.
Slashdot | Memristor — 4th Basic Element of Circuits
EETimes.com - 'Missing link' memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

I missed hearing about that one :eek:

truly revolutionary stuff :eek: