Although not published in incredibly recent
history, my article has absolute relevance to Chapter 5 and the subject of data
storage. The article, titled "In the Race between Optical and Magnetic
Storage, We Win," published on discovery magazine.com in September 2009,
states that in 2009 scientists at Cornell University developed ferroelectric
materials which would allow memory chips to "remember" even when the
power is off. Ferroelectric materials are substances that hold an electric
state without additional power. Applying a layer of a compound called strontium
titanate to silicon caused the strontium titanate to become ferroelectric;
scientists had theorized this result, but it had not been previously achieved.
Jonathan Spanier, a materials scientist from Drexel University, noted that
ferroelectric could "significantly reduced time spent reading by allowing
a computer to keep a browser or document open without using energy."
In a separate project, a scientist at Swinburne University
of Technology in Australia, James Chon, led a group of researchers in potentially
shattering the current limitations on storing data optically. Chon's group was
able to demonstrate the data could be stored in five dimensions, allowing more
than a terabyte of data to be stored on a single DVD-size disk. The researchers were able to achieve this by
embedding the disk with tiny gold particles (nanorods). The article states that
"by varying the length and orientation of the rods, the researchers were
able to record data based on the three dimensions of space, plus polarization
(the orientation of light waves) and color.
Currently, the most commonly used DVD type (DVD-5) holds about 5 GB of
data. There are a little over 1000 GB in a terabyte, so using Chon's process would
increase storage ability by more than 200 times.
My article link: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/22-in-race-between-optical-magnetic-storage-we-win
No comments:
Post a Comment