We all know that excessive moisture can typically wreak havoc on electronic devices, but now researchers have demonstrated that a little water can help create ultra-dense storage systems for computers and electronics.
A team of experimentalists and theorists at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Harvard University has recently proposed a new and surprisingly effective means of stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in nanostructures: terminating their surfaces with fragments of water. Ferroelectrics are technologically important smart materials for many applications because they have local dipoles, which can switch up and down to encode and store information.
According to the researchers a single wire of even a few atoms across can act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element which is here the prime factor behind this ultra dense memory devices. The researchers have also successfully demonstrated the benefits of using water to stabilize memory bits in segments of oxide nanowires that are only about 3 billionths of a meter wide.
The question is how water helps to building this devices holding higher number of bits. The key is how water sticks to oxides. Here water is the key ingredient in making these wires hold their state.
But another question is why nanotechnology again as usual take its place here. The results show that ferroelectric surfaces with water fragments or other molecules can stabilize ferroelectricity in smaller structures than previously thought.
Though a scheme for the dense arrangement and addressing of these nanowires remains to be developed, such an approach would enable a storage density of more than 100,000 terabits per cubic centimeter. If this memory density can be realized commercially, a device the size of an iPod nano could hold enough MP3 music to play for 300,000 years without repeating a song or enough DVD quality video to play movies for 10,000 years without repetition.
No comments:
Post a Comment