HP's Memory Spot Chip Brings The Bits-To-Atoms Connection Closer (Beyond RFID)

Information Week ^ | 7/24/2006 | Thomas Claburn

[sinkspur]

The distance separating the digital world and the real world got a little shorter last week when Hewlett-Packard showed off a tiny wireless chip that can attach data to physical objects......

..........Memory Spot is similar to a radio frequency identification chip, whose uses include tracking goods in the supply chain. The big difference is that RFID chips store a pointer or reference to a database entry, while Memory Spot stores the data itself. HP's chip has 4 Mbits of memory, despite being about the size of the tip of a pencil. That opens a range of uses, from sticking the digital version of a document or photo to a printout for easy copying to storing medical records on a patient's hospital ID bracelet.

HP is pitching Memory Spot as a commodity wireless data node that will be easy and cheap enough--at $1 a chip, it hopes--that businesses and consumers alike will dream up their own brilliant uses.

Memory Spot doesn't raise the privacy concerns associated with RFID because of its limited range; since a reader has to almost touch Memory Spot to read it, unauthorized access is much less likely. The chip's onboard processor also can handle authentication and encryption. "RFID is a great technology but has security, data storage quantity, and implementation challenges compared to bar codes at this point," says John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which uses passive RFID tags on wristbands to identify babies in its neonatal intensive care unit and on containers of mother's milk to get the right milk to the right baby. "The HP device seems to address these challenges directly and holds great potential for use in the medical environment."

[sinkspur]

An entire patient record can be recorded on a tiny $1.00 chip.

[Red Badger]

An industrial or foreign spy will love this device.........

[Darteaus94025]

Cool. Can we implant it in Egyptian exchange student as the deplane an aircraft?

[ShadowAce]

[Red Badger]

Yes, in their heads right between the eyes..........

[Sender]

I can see it now...the assassin slowly squeezes the trigger and the victim says..."ouch". He does not know that he has just been RFID tagged. "Darn mosquitoes."

[Red Badger]

Whole new meaning to the term "bugged".........

[gcruse]

"Memory Spot is similar to a radio frequency identification chip, whose uses include tracking goods"

Interesting. How often are inanimate objects referred to as "who"? To avoid the kludge of "similar to an RFID, which's uses include tracking..." or the repositioning involved in "similar to an RFID chip, the uses of which include tracking..." we turn the chip into a person.

Neat.

[Drammach]

4 Mbits ???

8 bits to a byte..

So we're talking 500 Kbytes memory...
Still impressive, considering the small size, but less impressive than what the article tries to make it sound..

[sinkspur]

I think that's a typo. 500KB ain't very much and hardly worth the trouble.

[Drammach]

Well, as long as you're dealing with strictly alphanumerics, 500kbytes would still be pretty adequate for most data/filing purposes..
That's 500K characters.. ASCII only uses 128 out of 265 possible characters, so, say 1 million characters..
That's at least a novel..

[ShadowAce]

That's 500K characters.. ASCII only uses 128 out of 265 possible characters, so, say 1 million characters..

I don't think that the number of possible characters relates to the number of characters within the 500K limit. It's still 500K.