4 ms·
IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms
- conanite 15y ago"The ultimate end of Moore's Law is a single atom." That's a bit depressing. Why a single atom, and not some smaller particle?
- fadzlan 15y agoI'm not quite sure I understand. Wouldn't a single atom as it is, the smallest particle possible?
- Anderkent 15y agoFrom what I remember from physics lessons, going with more elementary particles might be possible eventually, but not in any foreseeable future - (most/some) atoms are fairly stable by themselves, while keeping a hadron-based structure stable will probably be very difficult.
- cot6mur3 15y agoNice response. As for ultimate limits, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound. Of course, this bound doesn't really give bits per quark/particle limits - just an overall limit based on the spherical radius of the information-storing system.
- ars 15y agoYou may be able to store more than one bit in each atom.
- fadzlan 15y agoI would say that is more of delaying, rather than smashing it outright.
- AndrewDucker 15y agoMoore's Law says we should be able to fit transistors into a certain amount of space at a certain time. Getting well ahead of the curve would count as breaking Moor's Law, I'd have thought.
- guelo 15y agoData storage density doesn't really have anything to do with Moore's law.
- lusr 15y agoIt's difficult to take this article seriously given the terrible grammar and obvious technical errors, often in the same sentence, e.g. "The researchers then combined 96 bits make [sic] one byte of data..."; presumably "bits" should be "atoms". Such errors make me question whether anything in the article is accurate or being interpreted correctly.
- archangel_one 15y agoMy understanding was that Moore's law states that the number of transistors that you get for a given cost doubles every 18 months. Hence I don't think any result shown by researchers in a lab can be said to "smash" it until a similar technique is used in production for chips you can actually buy.
- vilda 15y agoMoore's law is one of the most misinterpreted laws :) It states that the number of transistors per INGOT SLICE will double each 18 months. Ingot (in semiconductor manufacturing) is a slice of silicon monocrystalline suitable for photolithographic and chemical processing. The main point is that while transistors are getting smaller, ingot slices are getting bigger. Edit: I mean misquoted (misinterpretation is a result).
- archangel_one 15y agoYes, I agree it's often misquoted. I don't see where it says anything about ingot slices in his original statement (see eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#History) though; I was thinking of the statement "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year", etc.
- michaelcampbell 15y agoThis seems an outlier at best; Moore's Law is an approximation, and this falls outside it (as have many). I would say "smashing" the law would be to find some way of manufacturing that would affect the rate of change the 18 months figure to ... 3 months, or something radically different, in perpetuity.
- buff-a 15y agoFTA: The experiment was performed at low temperature: about 1 degree Kelvin, which corresponds to about -272 °C (-458 °F). The byte starts switching randomly about once a minute due to thermal energy (heat) at about 5 degrees Kelvin. "low" indeed.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoThey proved such bits may exist, but have definitely not brought anything to market, nor even demonstrated a process to do so. They used a scanning electron microscope to fiddle atoms around, creating one bit. A science experiment, nothing more.