In a move that may very well eclipse IBM’s new flash-beating ‘Racetrack’ data storage technology, a team of chemists working out of Glasgow University claims to have hit upon a method that could lead to massive leaps forward in terms of data storage capacity.
New tech concept could see powerful computer storage squashed into iPods and MP3 players. Credit: Daniel Morris/Flickr.
The Glasgow University team is developing a molecular switch technology that enables significant data storage increases without requiring any form of size increase in the microchip. The team’s efforts could eventually lead to conventional handheld devices, such as MP3 players, able to carry somewhere in the region of 500,000 gigabytes (GBs) of data.
Unveiled through an article in the Nature Nanotechnology journal, the ongoing work of Professor Lee Cronin and Dr. Malcolm Kadodwala could potentially see something as small as a mobile phone easily carrying the memory capacity of even the most powerful personal computer systems.
“IBM are focusing on speed and increasing density modestly. They also have a working prototype by the looks of it,” commented Prof. Cronin in regard to IBM’s Racetrack solution. “We are conceptually pushing the limits by what could be possible -- making a molecular switch means that you cannot get much smaller, it starts to push at the fundamental constraints.”
Prof. Cronin also outlines in a Telegraph article that the team’s research and development into clusters of molybdenum oxide-based molecules, measuring only a billionth of a metre across, could see current chip transistor limits rocketing from 200 million to more than one billion, thus helping to facilitate such notable enhancements in data storage.
According to Dr. Vin Dhanak, a research scientist also working on the project, while the team’s molecular-based technology certainly holds masses of potential in terms of exploding storage barriers, the main problem facing its emergence is actual physical fabrication.
Unlike the Glasgow University team, IBM claims that its Racetrack technology, which is massively superior to current flash memory, will be within standard commercial devices before 2018.
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