CastleCops® - Delhi boy, Beijing girl make ultrasmall but real big computer breakthrough

Johnny-B-Goode writes "

Mumbai, February 15: An entire library on a chip the size of your thumbnail. That's an old science fantasy. But it should become a reality within this decade — and you just might have a Delhi boy and his Chinese wife to thank for it.

Harsh Deep Chopra and Susan Hua, both professors at the State University of New York at Buffalo, have made what is being regarded as one of the landmark breakthroughs in the race to shrink supercomputers to the size of your cell phone, or wristwatch.

The husband-wife team created a nickel sensor invisible to the naked eye. It measures only a few atoms across, but this microscopic device could eventually increase data-storage capacity of a computer by 1,000 times or more within this decade. The project, funded over the last six years by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF), is one of the efforts to address the snowballing problem of handling the humongous amounts of computer data the world is generating. Dr K.L. Murty, Programme Director at the NSF, said the breakthrough could have a major impact on the multibillion-dollar data-storage industry and improve scientific techniques in the study of magnetic effects on atoms and other nanoscale phenomena.

‘‘These nanocontacts are expected to find applications in ultra-high density storage systems in the terabit (a trillion bits) per-square-inch range, like a computer on a wristwatch,’’ Dr Murty told The Indian Express from Arlington, Virginia. Most computer hard drives today store anywhere from 20 to 80 gigabytes of data and they're much larger.

‘‘Because of the sensors’ high sensitivity at room temperature, they would be straightforward to adapt to work with existing technologies used by the $25 billion hard-disk drive industry,’’ notes a statement from the National Science Foundation. How did Hua and Chopra — whose parents live in Greater Kailash, New Delhi — do it?

‘‘The method is actually quite simple,’’ Chopra, 35, told The Indian Express from New York. The husband-wife team strung a nickel wire one-fiftieth the size of a human hair across two equally microscopic electrodes. What this did was to get electrons — given to drunkenly staggering through a wire — to straighten up and fly right. The wire’s diameter is so tiny that it’s smaller than each zig-zag of an electron, so they have no choice but to travel in a straight line.

There are other paths being used in the field. While some like Chopra and Hua use nanotechnology, others use holograms. IBM scientists recently announced that they had developed technology to compress one terabit per square inch, or nearly 20 times the storage solutions available now. It will take them a while to reach the market, but the potential is clear.

These innovations rank ‘‘up there with the first Intel 1103 chip (released in 1970) as a disruptive technology,’’ Red Herring tech expert Lee Bruno wrote in December 2002. ‘‘Imagine carrying around the entire Library of Congress in a handheld computing device. Surely that qualifies as a revolution.’’

Chopra and Hua’s breakthrough also uses the spin of an electron, not just its electrical charge, as in conventional electronics. This is a rapidly expanding field called spintronics, which with the nano-sensor is the key to Chopra and Hua’s advance.

A disk drive stores bits — the streams of 1s and 0s that comprise computer talk — on its surface. A magnetic field is applied to the data bits, and an electrified read head senses the amount of electrical resistance caused by the magnetic field to interpret the data.

As stored ‘‘bits’’ of data get smaller, their magnetic fields weaken, making them harder to detect and read. Chopra and Hua’s infinitesimally small sensor produces a very large change in resistance in a tiny magnetic field at room temperature — a major advance from other techniques that need extreme laboratory produced conditions. © 2002: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world.

Article and source: Indain Express "


	2002-2008 © Computer Cops LLC dba CastleCops®. All rights reserved. Acceptable Use Policy. Use signifies your agreement. 217ppm 0.280s (0.009s) Making cybercriminals unhappy since 2002*