Blood cell-sized memory chip demo created

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 25 January 2007 19:49

Entertainment

A report from the New York Times says that a miniscule memory chip has been created that is around the size of a white blood cell, although the scientists are unsure when it would be used commercially.

Think things are small enough? In the world of miniaturization, that’s never the case, with ongoing developments to shrink all kinds of technologies, whether in their final form, such as iPods and cellphones, to all the work being done in the field of nanotechnology.

Now a New York Times report says that scientists have succeeded in creating a prototype chip that can store 160,000 bits of information in an incredible dense formation, showing that Moore’s Law is set to be with us for many years yet.

The New York Times tells us that: “The scientists, led by James R. Heath of the California Institute of Technology and J. Fraser Stoddart of the University of California, Los Angeles, are to report their findings in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature”.

They quote Dr Heath, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, saying that: “Our goal always was to develop a manufacturing technique that works at the molecular scale.  It’s a scientific demonstration, but it’s a sort of a stake in the ground. It’s really small. It’s about the size of a white blood cell. We can store information in it, and we can read it out.”

He also said that: “I don’t know if the world needs memory like this. I do know if you can manufacture at these dimensions, it’s a fundamentally enabling capability.”

See the original article for more information.