HP puts 4M storage, 10M per sec wireless comms on rice grain

Stan Beer
Monday, 17 July 2006 20:56

Your IT - Home IT

A chip the size of a grain of rice that can store 4 Mbits and transfer data at 10 Mbits per second is the latest invention to come out of the research labs of Hewlett-Packard.

The barely visible device, dubbed the Memory Spot, contains a processor, memory and an antenna. What's more, it requires no power of its own to operate, drawing its energy from a special read-write device that can transfer data to and from the chip at the near Wi-Fi rate of 10 Mbits per second, which is 10 times as fast as Blue Tooth and up to 100 times as fast as RFID.

In order to operate the Memory Spot needs to be within very close proximity to the read-write device, which analysts say increases its level of security to greater than that of competing wireless technology.

Applications for the new device are being touted in the fields of medicine, business and security. Patients wearing their total medical history on a wristband, security cards with detailed identification, paper documents with embedded chips to add additional information and graphics capaility and a portable photocopy storage device are just some of the possible applications being put forward.

While current technology only allows storage of short videos and up to about 100 pages of text, future devices with higher storage are planned. Laws of physics permitting, one day we may even store feature films on a microdot.