IBM stores data on an atom
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(InfoWorld) - IBM has demonstrated how to perform certain computer functions on single atoms and molecules, a discovery that could someday lead to processors the size of a speck of dust, the company said Thursday. Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language. In a second report, researchers at IBM's lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday's edition of the journal Science. The new technologies are at least 10 years from being used for components in commercial products, but the discoveries will allow scientists to take a large step forward in their quest to replace silicon, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon. To build faster, smaller chips, IBM and other chip vendors like Intel and AMD have shrunk the dimensions of chip features from 90 nanometers to 65nm in the current generation of chips and plan to continue to 45nm and 32nm in coming years. The problem is that wires built from silicon tend to leak more electricity at each step on that scale and will eventually reach a limit where they are no longer useful. "Across all our areas of nanotechnology research, we're trying to determine the new kinds of materials we can use in computing when silicon reaches its fundamental limits. The ultimate goal is molecular-level computers, but the interim products will probably be hybrids with current technology, using things like carbon nanotubes," McMahon said. IBM defines nanotechnology as work done at a scale of 100nm or smaller. At that scale, scientists must use a tool called the STM (scanning tunneling microscope) to photograph and manipulate individual atoms as they did in their latest research. Their next challenge is to find a way to make these laboratory demonstrations work at room temperature, he said. Having measured the magnetic anisotropy of a single atom, "their next step is finding atoms that can do it at stable temperatures that are suitable for storage devices. If they can find that, it's still a decade out from commercialization," he said. The Zurich researchers also developed a technique for using a molecule containing two hydrogen atoms as a switch, either on its own or with an adjacent molecule. They are now looking to apply the method to many other molecules, enabling the system to work as a collection of logic gates, the building blocks of microprocessors. Even if the teams reach those goals, they must find a way to manufacture the systems on a large scale, instead of moving single atoms with the STM. One possibility is to use the process of self-assembly, where atoms under certain conditions will naturally form the desired shapes. In May, IBM said it had used that approach to insulate the wires on a chip by creating trillions of tiny, vacuum-filled holes around each one.
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By John Markoff  Scientists at IBM and two partner companies have developed a promising material that they believe will lead to a new kind of computer memory chip capable of meeting the world's growing appetite for storing digital music, pictures and video.
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IBM--in a race with Intel--moves to make faster, smaller chips by building silicon transistors from a rare combination of metals.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has released what it says is the first software that automatically self-manages and self-tunes databases containing key business information without human intervention.
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InfoWorld - IBM has demonstrated how to perform certain computer functions on single atoms and molecules, a discovery that could someday lead to processors the size of a speck of dust, the company said Thursday.
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This morning, IBM confirmed to BetaNews that later this afternoon, its engineers are scheduled to demonstrate their own concept chip, which will utilize an embedded memory architecture for caching.  The company is saying it could double the performance of existing 65 nm processors and future generations by tripling its cache memory capacity and perhaps increase the throughput of that memory tenfold.
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Particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently under construction at CERN in Geneva will produce around 15 Petabytes of data each year - 15 million, billion bytes.
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(InfoWorld) - Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM. The companies on Monday announced the results of their latest research into the technology, which they say will do a better job of storing songs, pictures, and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. Among the advances, the companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today's flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell, they said. The circuits on the device are much smaller than those on today's flash chips, measuring just 3 by 20 nanometers, and show that, unlike flash, phase-change memory will be suitable for production on the advanced manufacturing techniques targeted for use in 2015, the companies said. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The progress came partly from the development of a new material to build the memory chips, a germanium alloy to which the researchers added other elements to enhance its properties. The companies have applied for a patent for the material, they said. Besides IBM, the developers include Qimonda, the DRAM spin-off from Infineon Technologies, and Taiwan's Macronix International Co. They plan to discuss their findings at the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineer's 2006 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco later this week. It's the kind of breakthrough that people look forward to in the IT industry, although end users will have to be patient before it finds its way into products. It could take several more years for the technology to be developed sufficiently for use in finished products. Still, phase-change memory appears promising. The chips would be a new type of non-volatile memory, which is memory that can hold its electrical charge -- and its data -- after devices are turned off. Flash is also non-volatile, but phase-change memory can hold its electrical charge better than flash and use it more efficiently, its backers say. Flash also faces a roadblock in the future. As engineers make chip circuits more tiny, the circuits leak more power and ultimately lose their ability to store data after being turned off. The size limit appears to be around 45nm, although it will still be years before the flash industry starts using such tiny production technologies. Phase-change memory can be scaled down to 22nm, or far smaller than flash memory, the researchers developing it say. It also appears able to be more durable than flash, whose memory cells start to break down after 100,000 rewrites. While its prospects appear bright, the technology faces several hurdles. New chip designs must be relatively easy to manufacture, and they need to be cost-effective enough to attract device makers. RambusÂ faced this issue when its chips failed to overtake DRAM as the main memory type for PCs several years ago, despite having the backing of Intel. The problem, some companies said, is that the chips was were too costly to produce -- although Rambus vehemently disagrees with this. IBM has posted photos of the phase-change devices here, and some animation clips here.
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Measuring the minute amount of energy needed to flip the magnetic orientation of a single atom brings researchers closer to making devices that represent bits of information with just a few atoms.
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Using advanced "nanopatterning" techniques, IBM researchers plan to build 100TB tape storage devices.
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Clever 'perpendicular recording system' boosts storage capacity
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IBM Corp. researchers are touting one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made &#151; an image of the sun made from 20,000 microscopic particles of gold. The precision required is a breakthrough that heralds ultra-miniature sensors, lenses and wires inside nanoscale circuits of the future.
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TechWeb - IBM unveils its solution for company's looking for technology to deal with the &quot;data tsunami&quot; from sensors and radio frequency identification tags.
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IBM introduced a virtual tape storage management system for mainframe environments.
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Way to go Leaving aside the arm-wrestling practice IBM's legal department is currently getting with Platform Solutions Inc (PSI) and its ability to run IBM mainframe applications on any reasonably spec'd Itanium-based server, the availability of such software tools marks a development that could interest developers.â¦
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In papers presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) revealed a first-of-its-kind, on-chip memory technology that features the fastest access times ever recorded in eDRAM (embedded dynamic random access memory).
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IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.