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> “Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy.” What this says to me is it’s goin
by zakary 3y ago
> “Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy.”
What this says to me is it’s going to be incredibly slow to read and write. It claims in order to achieve the headline densities they will use 3nm spot sizes for writing bits, no way can that be done by optical microscope so electron beam it is.
There’s a reason why we don’t use e-beams to make computer chips, it’s incredibly slow. That’s why ASML sells a $200m machine to concentrate the extreme UV mask image down to the required sized. It can do all the writing in parallel, instead of serially.
I can still see this tech having use for long term archiving purposes, especially if it doesn’t end up being too expensive. But that’s a big if. Even if the ceramic storage tapes are free, running a massive high throughput electron microscope is unlikely to ever be anything close to inexpensive.
My intuition is that it will probably not be able to compete with just buying some traditional HDDs or tapes and keeping backups.
Maybe someone with more knowledge of the area can chime in?
- Apocryphon 3y agoThey're claiming that read/write speeds are at gigabytes per second using "low power" technologies.
- Euphorbium 3y agoThat seems insane.
- dekhn 3y agoWhy? In high throughput optics you are basically scanning one full frame of a 4K (3840x2160) per second (or higher!). If you store one bit per pixel, with 16 bit data, that's 10-20MB/sec. You would likely move the field of view to obtain 10FPS, so 200MB/sec per reader. However, it would be trivial to parallelize this (with more objectives, mirrors, higher resolution cameras or whole devices) and so it's not impossible to imagine an optimized, production version of this generating terabytes/second of raw data.
- aziaziazi 3y agoBecause positioning a 4K camera at nanometer scale is hard and moving it very precisely 10 times/sec is even harder. Reading each pixel at that scale and speed without substantial error correction seems crazy to me. You’ll probably want at least 3x3 pixels/bit and a higher resolution camera that moves less.
- dekhn 3y agoHigh resolution microscopy and electron beam microscopy are both industrial production technologies that cost far less than extreme chip-making. That is: there is already a business that supplies these technologies off the shelf. It's still not truly cheap, but it makes sense in the context of warehouse computing, in the same way that massive tape robots do. (I still think it's unlikely the economics of developing an entirely new storage tech like this will ever beat the established players, but the cost of the readers and writers is the least challenging aspect).