Nanotech To Replace Disk Drives Within Ten Years? 127
Ian Lamont writes "An Arizona State University researcher named Michael Kozicki claims that nanotechnology will replace disk drives in ten years. The article mentions three approaches: Nanowires (which replace electrons/capacitors), multiple memory layers on silicon (instead of a single layer), and a method that stores multiple pieces of information in the same space: 'Traditionally, each cell holds one bit of information. However, instead of storing simply a 0 or a 1, that cell could hold a 00 or a 01. Kozicki said the ability to double capacity that way — without increasing the number of cells — has already been proven. Now researchers are working to see how many pieces of data can be held by a single cell.'"
Re:That's just stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
That's funny, I didn't really expect anyone else to know about that. Well played sir.
It's actually pretty awesome how they did this, although I'm more familiar with the use in stained glass windows. The red tint in stained glass windows from that era was from the surface plasmon of gold nanoparticles. They made it by adding a gold salt to the molten glass solution, and as it cooled the glass became viscous fast enough that diffusion was too slow to form bulk gold. Instead, gold nanoparticles nucleated and sucked in the gold ions in the very local area, but couldn't conglomerate and drop out of solution because the glass was too thick. The history of this stuff is very cool, and I thank you for mentioning it!
I do think it's fair to say that hard drives are the first nanomaterial which we purposefully and knowingly created understanding that it was a nanomaterial.