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Technology Science

Nanoscale Switches in Memory 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the harnassing-the-power-of-the-atom dept.
Frans Faase writes "At the university of Boston, researchers are using nano-scale mechanical switches as a novel technology for building memory. These switches are extremely small, require only femtowatts of power to switch, but still can switch at speeds of 23.57 megahertz. And they are expected to become even smaller and faster and are expected to overcome the theoretical limit of 100 gigabits per square inch capacity for magnetic media."
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Nanoscale Switches in Memory More

Nanoscale Switches in Memory

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  • sweet (Score:5, Funny)

    by BitwiseX ( 300405 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:38AM (#10428813)
    You can pick these up at Radio Shack right?

  • So that means (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:38AM (#10428814)
    100 gigabits per square inch capacity for magnetic media

    One day my old vhs tapes could store all of my pr0n?

    Let me see my old T160 [high-techproductions.com] at 1075 feet * 12" * .5" wide * 100 gig * ... Well maybe two tapes. And you thought no one was going to manufacture the T200 [google.com] because the tape was dead - Ha I say; dont underestimate the power of...well you know.
  • Good thing we can't hear it.

  • do they come in olive? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:40AM (#10428830)
    I don't care how fast they are, if they don't come in olive, then I don't want'em!

  • Are we regressing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:43AM (#10428861) Homepage
    First a 30 year old OS is new again and now relay memory tehnology is the big thing! Wow!

    • Re:Are we regressing? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:00AM (#10429091) Homepage
      Well the telegraph was really a form of packet network akin to the Internet. Maybe history repeats itself? I think it has more to do with design philosophies that work well for some recurring problems. Also, a lot of technologies can't move ahead until complimentary technologies advance as well. The cellphone would go nowhere without better batteries. Maybe switches/relay memory stalled for a while until we can get better with fabrication techniques.

    • Re:Are we regressing? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Shillo ( 64681 )
      The company where I work currently uses the oldest programming language for the numerics core of its software package (that'd be FORTRAN) and we're in the starting phase of the move of everything else to the second oldest language (that'd be LISP).

      70's, 80's and 90's didn't really happen. ;)

      --

    • Bugs (Score:1)

      by perdu ( 549634 )
      Just watch out your switches don't get a bacterial infection, resulting in a Computer Bug [wikipedia.org]!

    • TFA doesn't say; do these things need power to hold their state like relays or dram, or do they work like flash memory?

  • A single nano-watt. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:43AM (#10428865)
    Can drive a million of these things.

    I wonder if this technology coluld be applied to making flying smart dust with silicon cilla?

  • femtowatts? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nuclear Elephant ( 700938 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:45AM (#10428885) Homepage
    ...is that like a feminine type of energy?

  • Mechanical == Achilles' Heel (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mipmap ( 569611 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:46AM (#10428886)
    How will these ever last as long as their electronic counterparts? If they are mechanical, they have moving parts, and moving parts wear out *much more quickly* than electronics without moving parts.
    • That certainly depends on the scale of the parts.

      The closer they are to the atomic scale, the more durable they will be.

      Just considder molecules and atoms.Memory built from single atoms will never wear. I think that is the whole idea.

      But they will suspectible to errors.

    • Re:Mechanical == Achilles' Heel (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I imagine that the rules change when you get down to the nanoscale. Besides, electronic components dohave moving parts; they're called electrons. :P
    • The last time I checked my hard disk it had moving parts in it... And I don't think it will survive a drop, which these things will, according to the article. I say hail to the mechanical memory!

    • Re:Mechanical == Achilles' Heel (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:05AM (#10429153)
      "Wearing out" usually involves microscopic particles getting rubbed off of the mechanical parts by friction. Each of these switches is probably smaller than any particle shedded by normal wear-and-tear, and also smaller than the surface features that the whole concept of friction is based on. That may give them essentially unlimited life, or at least lifetime comparable to solid state electronics (which can suffer some "wear" from atomic migration in the crystal lattice).
      • One mechanism for "wear and tear" in metals that might be appropriate to consider here is the one that happens due to crack propagation along crystal boundaries. Now, if these MEMS devices are smaller than a normal individual crystal, then there's much less chance of breakage.

        The article describes the design as a "beam-and-pad design ... , carving the switches from wafers made of single-crystal layers of silicon and silicon oxide". I would guess the beam does not have anything we'd recognise as a hinge, an

      • Each of these switches is probably smaller than any particle shedded by normal wear-and-tear, and also smaller than the surface features that the whole concept of friction is based on.

        Actually, friction increases with decreasing size. For nano-sized particles friction is one of the dominant effects and often cause microelectromechanical devices to fail due to "stiction"; one piece of the machinery semi-permanently sticking to another due to van-der-Waals forces.

    • Yesterday I received a bag of bad luck by breaking a million mirrors in my DLP projector.
    • Or not. It's application dependent, really. Think about military/space applications like Bush's "Star Wars" program. Dense high speed memory that is RAD-hardened against cosmic rays is extremely expensive, and not totally bit-error proof. The longer the RAD-hardened electronics stays in space, the more likely that it will be damaged. The old Soviet Union equipped their most advanced fighter and bomber aircraft with tube technology because they could recover from the EMP wave originating from nuclear de
    • Nanoscale mechanics changes things. Digital Micromirror Devices (DMDs) used in DLP projectors are aluminum mirrors that are meant to be cycled I think billions of times. They pulse maybe a couple hundred times a second, and are meant to last nearly a hundred thousand hours of such use without losing a pixel.

      Tensile strain operates differently in microscopic mechanisms.
    • Mechanical devices, in general, fail due to heat from friction. Yes, there are other failure modes but generally friction causes heat which causes failure in most cases.

      At such small sizes, even at very very high switching frequencies, I doubt the devices generate much friction or heat, meaning they won't wear out very quickly.

  • Radio Interference (Score:4, Interesting)

    by VE3ECM ( 818278 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:47AM (#10428904)
    The tiny dimensions of the device allowed it to vibrate quickly, achieving a millions-of-cycles-per-second frequency of 23.57 megahertz. This speed reflects the rate at which the device could "read" stored information. As a comparison, the hard drives in current laptops can read at a speed of a few hundred kilohertz (thousands of cycles per second) in actual operation. The researchers speculate that even smaller beams could be produced and that such devices could achieve true read speeds in the gigahertz range -- billions of cycles per second.


    I'm no electronics whiz, but if we can start making millions upon millions of devices that can resonate at higher frequencies, what possible interference will this cause with radio-communications?
    Is there an electronics nerd/engineer on here that can clarify that for me?
    • These seem to be *very* low power devices. i would expect that you would have to be within inches to detect any radio interference.

      eric
      • Sure, I know enough to get that... but I'm interested in the possible effect of a few million of them working in tandem...
        They claim a few "femtowatts" of power... throw a few million of them together, and all of a sudden you've got a resonating device easily in the hundreds of milliwatts... Enough to interfere with the gigahertz cell phone bands.
        • Since a Femto-watt = 10^-15, 10 billion or more would be required to reach even 20 milli-watts. I believe that even then a moderate amount of shielding would keep this from radiating too far.
          • Plus, they could do some trick like making half of them have the opposite current flow. But, I suppose that would only work well if they all switched at the same time.
          • Couldn't we just do something a bit akin to your microwave? Just assume some interference? Or also along the lines of the microwave, put a grounded metal "chamber" around the ram which would have holes poked in it to attempt to absorb the radio interference somewhat?

            Just thinking in terms of backround noise today from TV's, cell phones, microwaves, etc today I doubt this new ram technology is going to be much of a big problem. Most technology which is really reliant upon radio waves has the sense to put a
    • IANAE, but I have had some experience with this from Long Long Ago (tm). This was back when I had my 586 100 Mhz. My radio receiver would be right next to my computer, and I remember that if I tuned it to just the right frequency, I would hear a mid-range droning sound and high pitched spurts whenever the computer would be doing anything (from mouse movement to running a program.)
    • The average desktop PC puts out a whole lot of RF energy all by itself, due to all the high frequencies being transmitted between components. These new MEMS relays require only a tiny fraction of the power that DRAM requires (for example), and would consequently only radiate a tiny fraction of the RF noise that DRAM currently puts out.
    • There will be no interference. Mechanically vibrating stuff produces sound waves. Not radio waves.

      You have to get electric or magnetic fields to have any chance of interfering with radio.

  • So is this supposed to replacy my RAM or my hard disk? or both?

    • Hopefully both. And if not this technology then one day something that is fast enough and dense enough to do the job. CPU power is one area where we can increase the speed of our systems. A Gigabye/Terabyte storage mechanism that could replace RAM, operate at the speed of RAM, or something close to the clock speed of the CPU would have terrific bandwidth potential, and give us a huge increase in overall performance. And being non-volatile hopefully it wouldn't need the same power requirements as todays
      • I read about magnetic bubble memory a long time ago and have not seen anything yet. So I believe this will share the same fate. When it is ready ram memory will be in the tera bit range so it will be cheaper to use.
  • It sounds like a step back (towards mechanical systems) and a step forwards but in a new direction with previously difficult ideas. Seems cool but sounds like a technology with a much closer limit. Which in turn sounds like patch-technology.

    Will be interesting to see if this could become commerical.

  • Confused (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:50AM (#10428950) Journal
    Throughout that article they keep talking about how amazing this technology is because it's so much better than hard drives. But they never compare it to regular DRAM or Flash memory, which is probably what it would compete with in the marketplace, unless it is much cheaper to manufacture than DRAM or Flash, which seems unlikely seeing as it's based on silicon fabrication techniques.

    • Re:Confused (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Harinezumi ( 603874 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:15AM (#10429260)
      The problem with DRAM is that it's volatile (data gets lost when power is turned off), and the problem with Flash is that it's ass-slow (even slower write times than hard drives), so neither of them would really work as hard drive replacements.

      Assuming that this technology is non-volatile and as fast or faster than the high-end hard drives, it would make the perfect replacement for the hard drive in the storage niche, which is currently one of the biggest bottlenecks (and one of the few remaining sub-systems with moving parts) in modern computers.

      The technology this will have to beat is MRAM [wikipedia.org], which is both non-volatile and blazing fast.

      • The *other* problem with Flash is that it's way more expensive than hard drives. It would take $18,000 for me to buy enough Flash cards to replace my 120 GB hard drive (rough estimate of course). Unless this technology is two orders of magnitude cheaper, it can't compete with hard drives except in special low-power niches. This technology might replace Flash for use in mobile devices, but the article didn't compare it to Flash, and I'm wondering why since that seems the logical comparison to make.
        • Another problem with Flash is the limited number of read/write cycles compared to hard drives. It's something comparable to CDRW/DVD+-RW.
        • I'm only coming up with about $8500, (You can get 1GB of CF for $70 if you don't mind it being Sandisk) but point still taken. The reason they compare to hard drives is because hard drives are what we'd really like a replacement for, in the long run. Flash is just a replacement for magnetic drives that is unfortunately unsuited for all but a few tasks. We're hoping this new stuff works out better. That's all.

          • Re:Confused (Score:3, Informative)

            by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
            The thing is, with any form of solid state data storage, a transistor is the basic unit of an IC, and a 32 megabit FLASH (or other NVRAM) chip is about as complex (in terms of number of transistors) to produce as a 32 megabit DRAM chip.

            What that means is that the cost of NVRAM drives will always remain on the same order of magnitude of cost / capacity as RAM, whereas you need better than 1/100th of that cost/capacity to compete with hard drive storage. That $70 for one GB of FLASH storage simply doesn't s

  • Sparks? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:53AM (#10428975) Homepage
    I went to a presentation given by an exec from Intel once. He talked about tiny mechanical switches. After the presentation a few professors in the EE and CE department raised their arms and questioned the idea. Among the points they brought up was that mechanical switches are unreliable. Sparks can fly and generate enough force to destroy the switches. It was precisely unreliability that lead to the invention of the transistor in the first place.

    While the article mentions these switches being extremely robust, what have they done to address some of those older issues?

    • Re:Sparks? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While the article mentions these switches being extremely robust, what have they done to address some of those older issues?

      Nanoscale is ATOM scaled, and the mechanical issues are difficult but ENTIRELY different from the mechanical issues of machines 10000 times larger.

      At the atom level, chemistry is the right frame of mind, not thermodynamics/friction/dust/surface quality.

    • Re:Sparks? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by WalksOnDirt ( 704461 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:16AM (#10429265)
      Consider the TI micro-mirror display chips. They are mechanical and seem to last quite a while, and a single failure creates a noticeable display flaw.

      The smaller switches considered here would probably be much more reliable.
      • From the grandparent:
        Among the points they brought up was that mechanical switches are unreliable. Sparks can fly and generate enough force to destroy the switches.

        From the parent:
        Consider the TI micro-mirror display chips. They are mechanical and seem to last quite a while, and a single failure creates a noticeable display flaw.

        While I understand why you bring up these devices, this doesn't address the sparks concern in the grandparent post, only the mechanical reliability of continually flexing the
        • Are these switches opening and closing a circuit? It's hard to tell from the article.
          • Are these switches opening and closing a circuit? It's hard to tell from the article.

            Having now read the article, it doesn't look like it. They talk of clamping both ends of the beam and then vibrating it to generate the two states (I assume by amplitude of vibration). What isn't clear is how they are then "reading" the state of the beam. What really has me confused now is if they are dependant on the vibration...how can they retain a state without power to keep vibrating? If they were flipping a swit
    • Do a search on MEMS.

      Roger

  • Boston University (Score:2, Informative)

    by zosa ( 261289 )
    sorry to nitpick but its "Boston University" not "the University of Boston"

    BU Alum '84
    • All that money on a Boston University degree and they never taught you the difference between "its" (a possessive adjective) and "it's" (a contraction of it is).
      Worse, they never explained that simple grammer mistakes would negate the force of any written public argument. Nor, did they explain how to use widely-available computer tools to catch these little things before publishing.

      I remember every day in October 1972 passing the BU main dorm near Kenmore Square where the students had placed huge ind

  • University of Boston? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Legendre ( 634519 )
    I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a "University of Boston". Are they neighbors with Caltech University or Georgia Tech University perhaps?
    Do editors even know what I'm talking about?
    • I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a "University of Boston". Are they neighbors with Caltech University or Georgia Tech University perhaps?

      Or University of Indiana. Damn, nobody told me about the name change. I wonder if the expense form I'm filling out is still valid....

      • Well, as long as we're throwing around university name confusion, think of Miami University vs University of Miami. One of the two is in Oxford. Oh- that's Oxford, Ohio, mind you. :)

  • Get the name right (Score:2, Informative)

    by cyngus ( 753668 )
    At the university of Boston

    Its Boston University, my alma mater.
    • We're the People's Front of Judea! Judean People's Front!?

      • Re:Get the name right (Score:4, Funny)

        by drwho ( 4190 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:34AM (#10429467) Homepage Journal
        Ah but it does matter: University of Boston is my copyright. And we are proudly free of scientologists, one-armed despots, and haven't had to pay any money to dismiss ex-NASA administrators because we are too smart to hire any.

        The University of Boston offers, among couses:

        - KAR01 - Defensive Driving
        - KAR02 - Offensive Driving
        - KAR02 - Navigation without street signs
        - ATH01 - Philosphy of Baseball - Why being #2 is better
        - ATH02 - Basketball -How can so many black guys can still be call Celtics
        - LIN01 - Linguistics and Pronunciation - Dialects of Somerville, Charlestown, South Boston, and Jamaica Plain compared
        - BUS01 - How to get rich in the University business
        - BUS02 - How to get rich in the Politics business
        - BUS03 - How to get rich in the Trashy Soveniers business
        - BUS04 - How to get rich by renting slum apartments to students

        And many more!

  • Oh good..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mr_z_beeblebrox ( 591077 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:02AM (#10429123) Journal
    A new theoretical limit is sorely needed as I had almost thought of a way to exhaust the old limit.

  • This is just a press release! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:06AM (#10429165) Journal
    There are no pictures, no equations. And note, in reading that when they say:
    The researchers used electron-beam lithography to produce the beam-and-pad
    the first beam is stream of particles/photons and the second "beam" is a little silicon springboard that can move under the influence of an applied voltage. See the cover story on the Jan 2003 issue of Sci. Am. for a lot more of the "how it works" info. The on line version is $cienctific American's [sciam.com] to increase revenue...the hardcopy at your library has the pictures and costs nothing.
    BTW It doesn't look like one of these things would fare well if you dropped it.
    • Oops, I don't think you are referencing the right article. The article you point to is on "Nanodrive". It's essentially a scanning probe mircroscope (like an AFM), but with a large # of probes reading and writing simulataneously. It's an interesting device, but not the one discused here.
      • I stand corrected. I couldn't understand the article well enough to make a correct identification of the distinction between the two designs. Funny that my comment got modded all the way to 5 even though "check your facts" would have been a fair response.

  • and we laughed... (Score:3, Funny)

    by acvh ( 120205 ) <geek.mscigars@com> on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:07AM (#10429180) Homepage
    at the mechanical pong guy.....
  • 100 gigabits per square inch capacity for magnetic media

    What makes the transfer rate limit for magnetic media 100 gigabit/inch? Why this specific number? Does anyone know?
    • It has something to do with the minimum size of magnetic domains. The crystalline structure of magnetic materials isn't much smaller than 1E11/sq.in. You need enough domains next to each other to maintain the magnetic alignment of a bit; otherwise they begin to flip randomly (data loss) or are undistinguishable from adjacent domains (low s/n ratio).

      This is based on my memory though, and not on direct reference from any authentic source though, so consider that my reasons may not be accurate.

      --dv
    • What makes the transfer rate limit for magnetic media 100 gigabit/inch? Why this specific number?

      It's another limitation of the BIOS API.

    • What makes the transfer rate limit for magnetic media 100 gigabit/inch?

      That's not transfer rate, that's density. FWIW, 100 gigabits per square inch comes out to 316,227 magnetic domains per linear inch. Those are awfully small donuts.

      Why this specific number? Does anyone know?

      I presume it's related to the minimum size of a magnetic domain that can be changed (magnetized either direction) without changing the adjacent magnetic domains.
    • it's b.s. current high end disk drives are either at or above 100Gb/in^2. they had plans to push to 150Gb/in^2 w/ the current technology (called longitudinal recording). after that it's not clear it will work. essentially the magnetic bits (a collection of grains whose magnetic moments lie in roughly the same direction) will become unstable (spontaneous data loss).

      one way to get around this (forget about IBM's pixie dust) is to do perpedicular recording. there you can pack muck higher linear densities, but

  • Google Feynman Drexler nanodot.org. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:32AM (#10429444)
    The idea of atom-by-atom construction was first put forth, in a scientific manner, over 40 years ago by Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988). In a speech given in December of 1959 entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," Feynman lauded the "...staggeringly small world that is below" (2). He challenged his fellow scientists to find ways by which to create manufacturing, storage, and retrieval systems that are as efficient as DNA and to contain such systems in a submicroscopic, self-contained unit the size of a cell. Feynman even offered an economic incentive to facilitate matters, several $1,000 prizes. Today prizes in Feynman's honor are awarded annually and biannually to scientists and students who think small. There are prizes for individuals and teams in theoretical and experimental categories and for achievements in nanotechnology (3).

    Since Feynman's speech, things have been shrinking steadily. In the days when Feynman was a child, things were manufactured on the scale of one meter, which is approximately person size (4). At the time he gave his famous talk, technological accomplishments included vacuum tubes, which are measured on in millimeters (5). Currently, our lives are full of things that are built on a scale one thousand times smaller. Micrometers are the scale upon which today's computer components are measured (6). A thousand times smaller yet is "the scale where atoms become tangible objects" (7). This is the goal of nanotechnology, where the building of nanomachines will be realized.

    The National Technology Initiative of the year 2000, which proposes funding $270 million worth of research, outlines goals that sound remarkably like an updated version of Feynman's forty-year-old speech. Using today's scientific jargon, the NNI proposes funding improved computers, bottom-up manufacturing of strong, lightweight, materials constructed out of inexhaustible resources, and nanoengineered, molecular sized medical cures (1). Bottom-up is the current technical term for building things the way in which biological systems do, "...at the molecular level, and in three dimensions" (8). Among other things, the NNI proclaims the government's intention to fund the development of technology that will allow the "shrinking the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube" (1). Forty years prior to the NNI, Feynman declared that it was entirely possible to put the "Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin" (2). Attaining the ability to compact vast amounts of information into a small area surely will revolutionize the dissemination of knowledge and have a profound impact upon industry. However, the potential effects of these compacting technologies upon biological systems have heretofore only been fully explored in the domain of science fiction.

    I couldn't help but wonder if the story that became the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage had been inspired by Feynman's speech. In "Plenty of Room" Feynman mentioned that a friend suggested "although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon" (2). Perhaps the stated objective of the NNI to employ nanoengineered gene therapies, cancer detectors and drug delivery systems," may sound more creditable than swallowing your doctor. But put forth an equally serious manner, as the NNI, was Feynman's proposal that "... small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately-functioning organ" (2). And forty-plus years ago he offered a method by which to manufacture "such a tiny mechanism."

    Feynman proposed first manufacturing a full-scale precision "master-slave hand" machine. The next step would be to use this machine to make a one-quarter sized model itself. Next, he suggested, using the smaller replica of the original machine, make tools that were small enough to make a replication of the "hands" that would again be reduced to one-quarter the size of its predecessor. He hypothesis that by continuing this shrinking proc
  • Enough holes in this story to drive several Beowulf clusters thru it: * They switch at 27Mhz do they? How many times can you flip a mechanical switch before it breaks? (About 0.1 seconds worth for most switches) * Ok, it takes no power somehow to hold the info. But what about reading/writing it? It's going to take not only power, but several transistors per bit. Good old DRAM nowdays is down to 1 well and one MOSFET per bit. ( plus row and column drivers). Can't even approach that with anything mec
    • I don't think most of what of what you say will be a problem. Mechanical parts at this size scale are very robust, and there are probably easy ways to keep the dust out. RF intereference shouldn't be a serious issue either (devices are way smaller than the wavelength). If the device is always suspended then surface tension shouldn't be an issue. I don't know whether static electricity would be any worse here than CMOS.

      However...

      But what about reading/writing it? It's going to take not only power, but
    • of course hard drives and solid state memory work so well under dusty, static-charged conditions! I think the biggest hurdle would be adopting a new technology into an well established mass commodities market. Maybe this stuff could find its way into BIOS? Good luck to them anyways.
  • This reminds me of fuel injectors for cars. They are simply silicon valves that open and close hundreds of times per second depending on fuel needs. More info can be found at howstuffworks: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-injection3.htm [howstuffworks.com] One of the big problems of the auto industry is making engines burn fuel more efficiently. A lot of it has to do with how well the fuel and air mix before combusion. There may even be an application for this in car engines, if we replace single injectors with many th
  • Magentic storage has an advantage of being extremely tolerant of physical shock. Mechanical switches such as this are not. Imagine a notebook drive with this technology where all the bits flip to 0 everytime you toss it into your backpack.

    "It's as though a billion tiny switches cried out in terror and were suddenly flipped"


    • Why don't you read the article? They quite clearly state that these switches are extremely robust and work quite well even after being dropped.

  • Nantero [nantero.com] was earlier [slashdot.org] with it's nanotube-based mechanical NRAM [nantero.com]. They have a nice movie [nantero.com] explaining their technology.
  • If you guys have complained about stability, think about this. How many MILES does a hard disk platter "travel" in say, a year? let's see, 7200 revolutions per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours per day,... do you really think this is STABLE?

    You drop it, it becomes unusable due to the precision required to align the HD heads and prevent collisions.

    In contrast, MEMS (micro electro mecanical switches) only move back and forth. And only by NANOmeters. And we're talking about crystalline materials here (did you know that carbon nanotubes , for example, have a much greater endurance than diamonds? AND they're flexible).

    Plus, nanoswitches, even when they can be "moved", have a limited and stable range of movement. And being non ferro-magnetic makes them immune to EM interference. If you flick a switch today, it requires exactly the same action in exactly the opposite direction to alter the information. But with a floppy disk... hey, just get it near to your stereo.

    Of course, do you think scientists would be dumb enough not to add an "isolation" layer to deal with vibrations? But look, to alter these thingies we'd have to talk about vibrations in the megahertz scale.

    So yes, in the future, I think these babies will be the replacement for flash memories and hard disks.
  • For those not in the know, this technique, although interesting, is NOT persistent, i.e. : drop the power, and loose your data. Hardly a solution for harddrive technology. Memory: yes, harddrive: no.

    The effect they are using is a non linearity in the restoring force of a doubly clamped beam. It is well known that if you have a nonlinear restoring force F = kx + k_3 x^3, for sufficiently large driving power, the amplitude close to resonance becomes bistable. (This system is called a Duffing oscillator).

  • Nit Pick (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Reckless Visionary ( 323969 ) *
    Sorry for the nit pick, but this is not the "University of Boston" as the submitter wrote. I'm an alumnus, and it is "Boston University."

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