world's densest memory circuit !!!

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) said that they have created the world's densest memory circuit, one that's about 100 times denser than today's (28Jan2007) standard memory circuits, while remaining as small as a human white blood cell.

The circuit has 160,000 bits of capacity, compared with previous generations of molecular circuits that were demonstrated at 64 bits. But researchers point to the circuit's density as the real breakthrough: 100 billion bits per square centimeter, which the researchers said is about 100 times more tightly packed than current memory circuits.

I was amazed when I came to know that technology is advancing more quickly than Moore's Law, the 1965 observation by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years. I remember, during my undergrad years, when my prof (A.Madhiazhagan [A.M. for short]) said that Moore's Law will be broken someday...& YES...Today is the day!

The researchers described the 160,000 memory bits as being arranged like a large tic-tac-toe board, with 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires and a layer of molecular switches in between. Each bit is just 15 nanometers wide, compared with the most dense memory devices currently available that measure 140 nanometers in width. FYI - A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

The latest development shows development progressing from research into something manufacturable. It's the sort of device that a semiconductor company like Intel Corp. would contemplate making in 2020.

"This shows it is possible to manufacture really high-fidelity circuits at a density that is more molecular in scale than the way things have been done traditionally," Caltech chemistry professor James Heath said. "That's what we were really after. The memory is just a demonstration of that."

I love u technology...



Courtesy: CNN