IBM Back to the Future with Nanotech 'Punch Card'

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Tue Jun 11,12:06 AM ET

By Peter Henderson

 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. have punched holes about 6,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair in a piece of plastic, creating a novel form of data storage.

 

 

After six years of work the Zurich-based researchers say they can fit 1 terabit of data -- effectively the contents of a 100-gigabyte computer hard drive -- on a postage stamp-size piece of plastic.

 

The data takes the form of up to a trillion holes drilled by a precise and extremely hot nano-needle, the researchers said.

 

In the world of data storage, dominated by disk drives which hold bits and bytes electromagnetically and flash memory cards for Palm Pilots and digital cameras that use electrical charges, holding information in hole-punches seems old hat.

 

However, the company that preceded IBM set the world on fire 110 years ago by making computer punch cards.

 

"One of our slogans is back to the future of mechanics," said Peter Vettiger, leader of the project, called Millipede, in a telephone interview from Zurich. His holes are 10 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, and about 3 billion of them fit in a punch card hole.

 

He said that in the best of circumstances, including IBM deciding to continue the project's funding, consumers might be able to buy by late 2005 a mechanical memory chip based on the research that would hold 5-10 gigabytes of data.

 

Information, which would be translated into a binary arrangement such as zeros and ones in other computer memory systems, is broken is broken into dots and dashes that become holes and flat surfaces on the plastic surface of the new chip.

 

The plastic sits on a piece of silicon. Hovering above it are roughly 1,000 tiny phonograph arms, each with a needle on the end.

 

The phonograph arm is actually made of two different materials that conduct heat differently. At 400 degrees centigrade, one side expands more than the other, bending the arm and plunging the hot needle into the plastic, creating a hole with a lip on the side.

 

Subsequently, a second plunge just to the side of the first would heat the material and cause the initial hole to fill in, making it possible to rewrite on a chip.

 

To read data, the needle is heated about 100 degrees less, so that the arm bends but the tip cannot melt the plastic. The tip then measures the resistance between the surface and what's beneath it. A hole reads differently than a flat area.

 

Vettiger said that the technology was best for low-power, mobile situations, since the chip works fine at speeds that are much slower than competing technologies.

 

Even so, the nanotech punch-card was fast enough to supply information to a broadband network, for instance, IBM said. With more energy, the chips can transfer information faster, he added.

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How likely is for this project to succeed? if and when it's completed would you use chips that are slower than the competing technologies?.

 

I personaly think it would not pass the planing stage because every product has to be funded by somebody who is convinced of the likelyhood of the product competing in the market share....and punch holes don't sound promising to me.

anyway the questions is what you guys think of this?

[Medley of extemporanea]

I'll take the "wait and see"... It seems what they are saying is that the chips will be able to store large amounts of data cheaply, but that data will slower to access. Kind of like tapes? Maybe the application for such technology will be data warehousing.