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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 …

COMMENTS

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  1. The First Dave
    Boffin

    Cantilever?

    Dunno why they call it a cantilever, it is a simple spring as far as I can see, but ingenious non the less.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    but

    What happens if you drop it?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Simon Harris

      Etch-a-sketch

      Do you just have to give it a good shake to erase the memory?

  3. Dr. Mouse

    Love it

    Engineering at it's best. Very simple, elegant and original solution.

  4. nederlander

    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.

    1. gabor1

      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.

  5. Bronek Kozicki
    Heart

    nice

    so it has very low power consumption and latency barely twice of DRAM? There must be a catch somewhere.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      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

  6. Mage Silver badge

    Z1

    Can we build a Z1 on a chip now?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29

  7. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    We've come full circle...

    Storing digital data by way of little tiny 'Morse code' hand keys.

  8. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    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.

  9. umacf24
    Boffin

    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.

  10. 2cent

    "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world."

    "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world."

  11. perlcat
    Welcome

    Bah.

    Moving parts wear out. Good luck with your electron microscope and soldering iron to fix.

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