Going back a few years there was a company in Sydney — memory, memory, I’ll be forgetting the names of my wives next — which specialized in putting a lot of information in to a small space. Its space of choice was the ubiquitous 3.5 inch floppy disk.

One day, in answer to a challenge from me, they put the whole of The Bible, the King James version, on to a single floppy disk. You could happily search and read any portion. I did. At the time, a miracle.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles have now taken that miracle many steps further. They have created an ultra-dense memory device the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have space left over.

Yes, yes, I understand clearly you have no need for a smaller than a blood cell copy of the Declaration of Independence but the fact is, it is possible. (Interesting that in both cases two of the most wonderful pieces of writing are used for the comparison. There is nothing to touch the majesty of the King James Bible except, perhaps, the magic of The Declaration of Independence.)

This is a step, not the full journey, a step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and more powerful than today’s computers.

James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry (a title to conjure with) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of a paper on the research, said, ‘It’s the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year 2020. But at the moment it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions.’

The 2020 date works within the incorrectly named Moore’s Law which is not a law but a hypothesis suggesting the complexity of an integrated circuit will typically double every year. In fact, it has already shown to be somewhat misleading although it held good for almost thirty years.

Heath’s group manufactured the memory circuit in a cleanroom facility in their labs at Caltech, and the molecular switches were prepared by J. Fraser Stoddart, the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fred Kavli Chair (another splendid name) in Nanosystems Sciences, and his group.

Stoddart and Heath are pioneers in molecular electronics — using nanoscale molecules as key components in computers and other electronic devices.

The circuit has a bit density of 100 Gb per square centimeter which would appear to be a record for integration density in a man-made object.

The 160,000 memory bits on the memory device are arranged like a large tic-tac-toe board: 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires, each 16 nm wide, with a layer of dumbbell-shaped molecular switches — called [2]rotaxanes– sandwiched between the crossing wires.

Each wire crossing defines a bit, and a single bit is only 15 nm wide, or about one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. So Intel going for 50 nm with its new chip technology is positively clumsy in contrast.

William R. Dichtel, a researcher with the project, said, ‘One of the most exciting features of this research is that it moves beyond the testing of molecular electronic components in individual, non-scalable device formats and demonstrates a large, integrated array of working molecular devices. In targeting a large memory array, many fundamental issues of how information is stored and retrieved had to be addressed.

‘Whether it’s actually possible to get this new memory circuit into a laptop, I don’t know. But we have time.’

J. Fraser Stoddart said, ‘In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman said it should be possible some day to store all of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the tip of a needle. We’re not there yet, but we’re not far off.’

PS. If you do not know who Richard Feynman was look him up in Wikipedia. One of the most remarkable scientists of our time and my hero.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 3:55 am under Science and technology, Technology.

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