IBM to tear down Moore's Law (Oh goody -- what will a new Fab cost now?)

IBM announced on Thursday that its boffins managed to cut the physical requirements for a bit of data, whereby number of required atoms has been reduced from a million to only 12.

Of course, it goes without saying that this means higher density and more space. Indeed, 1TB drives would quickly become old news as 100TB or 150TB would become a common thing.

For its research, IBM used antiferromagnetism to achieve 100 times denser memory. Antiferromagnetism refers to magnetic moments of atoms or molecules where they align with neighboring spins pointing in opposite directions. Note that current devices use ferromagnetic materials.

Antiferromagnetism is of course quite tricky and exceeding a certain temperature, called the Néel temperature, causes bit size to be much more than 12 atoms. Thankfully, this is still much better than what the current technology offers.

For its experiments, IBM used iron atoms on copper nitrate. However, it is said that other materials could in theory do even better, i.e. use less atoms per bit.

IBM’s researcher Andreas Heinrich said:”Moore's Law is basically the drive of the industry to shrink components down little by little and then solve the engineering challenges that go along with that but keeping the basic concepts the same. The basic concepts of magnetic data storage or even transistors haven't really changed over the past 20 years (…)The ultimate end of Moore's Law is a single atom. That's where we come in."

More here.

“This is starting to get ridiculous. Next someone will claim that he worked on an original Babbage Difference Engine.”

For this to work you have to read it in an “old geezer telling his grandson about when he was a kid” voice .....

“Babbage difference engine you say? Why in MY day we didn’t have those fancy wind up computers. We used the CABBAGE Difference Engine. If you wanted to know the difference between 10 and 7, you put 10 cabbages on the desk, and then you took 7 of them off the desk. What was left was the difference. And we liked it!”

I worked as a maintenance trainee for IBM in Chicago's Loop when there were still a few of the tube computers/calculators at our customers.

I saw a 604, a couple 650's, and a 709--but never had to train to work on them.

Many of our customers were transitioning from exclusively punch card equipment directly to transistor computers such as the 1401, 1410, and 7070. Of course, they still had rooms full of punch card operators banging away on model 24's, 26's and the equivalent verifiers. And still needed duplicating punches, interpreters, and sorters.

I saw a 604, a couple 650's, and a 709--but never had to train to work on them.

And changing the oil on a 407 accounting machine was about like overhauling a beetle engine. At least as messy, anyway.

Gracious, some of us old f4rts go back a ways, don't we? ≤}B^)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.