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Computers are getting smaller. Processors are getting smaller. Why shouldn’t hard drives get smaller, too? Don’t worry – IBM’s working on it. Late last week, the company announced that its researchers had “successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms.” In comparison, it takes close to a million atoms for current HDDs to store a bit. Apparently, being dense is a good thing!
We’d paraphrase the technology for you, but we’d probably butcher the technical details, so here’s a description straight from the horse’s mouth:
The scientists at IBM Research used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to atomically engineer a grouping of twelve antiferromagnetically coupled atoms that stored a bit of data for hours at low temperatures. Taking advantage of their inherent alternating magnetic spin directions, they demonstrated the ability to pack adjacent magnetic bits much closer together than was previously possible. This greatly increased the magnetic storage density without disrupting the state of neighboring bits.
If your head isn’t spinning yet, IBM’s press release has even more details. Or you could just watch the video above, which outlines the technology pretty effectively.
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dgrmouse
January 16, 2012 at 8:20pm
This isn't shocking. I saw a demo where they arranged xenon (?) atoms into their company's name with the same tech well over a decade ago.
Hey.That_Dude
January 16, 2012 at 4:04pm
And in 10 to 20 years while this matures, everyone will switch over to high density NAND or it's equivalent. If we see this actually hit market in 20 years it would be awesome.
