Memory may very well be on the cusp of becoming a lot higher density, if recent research being done by North Carolina State University engineers is anything to go by: they have created a new memory material that could allow a chip the size of an SD card to store the raw data of 20 Blu-Ray discs.
Headed by Professor Jagdish Narayan of NC State University’s Materials Science and Engineering department, the process involves “selective doping,” which is when an impurity is added to a material on purpose to change its properties. In this case, the change improves the material and makes it hold more information: nickel was added to ceramic, resulting in a cluster of nickel atoms 10 square nanometers across that can score data, capable of storage density of more than 10 trillion bits per square inch.
“Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, we have a created a prototype that can [potentially] handle one terabyte,” says Narayan.
This isn’t just a pie-in-the-sky prototype, either. Wide scale manufacturing could happen in just a year or two. Even better: the production process is not significantly more expensive than current memory production.
“We haven’t scaled up our prototype but we don’t think it should cost a lot more to do this commercially,” he said. “The key is to find someone to start on the large-scale manufacturing process.”
Let’s hope a partner steps up, willing to take a chance. I, for one, want a terrabyte iPhone in the next five years.
Read more at Gadget Lab