One trillion bytes, made in nanoscale.
Current flash memory is manufactured with relatively standard silicon materials, and similar to processors there are size and physical property limits placed upon them due to the restrictions of the materials themselves.
Engineers at North Carolina State University have got around this problem by using a different substance to create their chips, fusing Nickel (Ni) and Magnesium Oxide (MgO) together to create a metallic ceramic material.
This NiMgO material developed clusters of nickel atoms only 10nm across, significantly smaller than the current 45nm manufacturing process for most recent processors, allowing a huge amount of data density.
They mention that a fingernail-sized chip manufactured on current flash techniques could hold 20GB of data; but the total capacity of the NiMgO ceramic chip could hold a potential 1TB - in other words, a fifty fold increase.
Not only does this new material have potential uses in flash memory but it's also quite applicable to car engines and any other component that deals with heat, though for the interim the engineers will continue experimenting with the doping of other metals into MgO.
Head to computerworld for a little more on this new ultradense storage and make sure you read our feature on Memristor tech.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012