1TB Fingernail-Sized Chip Revealed
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Thursday, 05 November 2009 12:09 |
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 A group of engineers from North Carolina State University developed a new material which could allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, which are numbers that exceed by far the storage capacities of today’s computer memory systems.
The group of engineers how are led by Dr. Jagdish “Jay” Narayan, John C.C. Fan Family Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at NC State, made their discovery by using the process of selective doping, which means that an impurity is added to a material that changes its properties. This process looks promisinf for boosting vehicles’ fuel economy and reducing heat produced by semiconductors, which could translate in more efficient energy production.
When they discovered this new material the engineers were working at the nanometer level — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers — and they added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The new material obtained contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers which represents a 90 percent size reduction compared to today’s techniques and this means that this material could boost computer storage capacity.
Narayan declared: “Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data.”
This discovery means a huge leap not only for information storage. Narayan explains that by introducing metallic properties into ceramics, engineers will be able to develop a new generation of ceramic engines capable of sustaining twice the temperatures of normal engines and as a result to achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon. And like any new technology which sees improvements over time, this technique could also be used in applications which harness alternative energy sources like solar energy.
This new discovery also advances knowledge in the emerging field of “spintronics,” which focuses on harnessing energy produced by the spinning of electrons. Almost all the energy produced today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces, but unlike this technique there is no heat produced with the energy which is created by the spinning. The NC State engineers achieved to manipulation of the nanomaterial so the electrons’ spin within the material could be controlled, which could be of great value when harnessing the electrons’ energy.
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