Storage
Back to the nano-mechanical future
Edinburgh researchers and others have devised a way to use nano-cantilevers to charge carbon nanotube transistors with binary values faster and more power-efficiently than NAND cells get charged. Once again the scientists raise the possibility of their invention replacing flash, as many have done before. As reported in Nature …
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Cantilever?
Dunno why they call it a cantilever, it is a simple spring as far as I can see, but ingenious non the less.
Etch-a-sketch
Do you just have to give it a good shake to erase the memory?
Love it
Engineering at it's best. Very simple, elegant and original solution.
a question of scale
Anonymous Coward,
Presumably at that scale, the cantilever it is far too small to be bend under the kind of deceleration it would encounter on being dropped. I mean, if you drop an ant it doesn't go splat.
No ants were harmed in the production of this post.
Antz
The ant doesn't go splat because its terminal velocity is small. Try dropping an ant glued to the bottom of a hard drive: it will go splat indeed. But I agree with you that any such danger is probably easily mitigated by mechanical isolation, as is currently done in hard drives: read heads do not like being slammed into the magnetic media either.
nice
so it has very low power consumption and latency barely twice of DRAM? There must be a catch somewhere.
maybe
it would be the incredibly reasonable price of gold...oh wait...so that's what all those cash for gold firms are doing with what they buy :¬D
Z1
Can we build a Z1 on a chip now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29
We've come full circle...
Storing digital data by way of little tiny 'Morse code' hand keys.
So the gate is isolated by an air gap rather than a silicon oxide layer.
Rather like those microchip valves developed by GEC and IIRC Los Alamos in the 80s for nuclear use.
This looks a lot more reproducible.
Maxwell's Demon
I wonder if thermal noise would be sufficient to flex this over -- it looks like a wonderful way for Maxwell's demon to communicate with the macro world.
"Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world."
"Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world."
Bah.
Moving parts wear out. Good luck with your electron microscope and soldering iron to fix.
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