In the book The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss, I recall reading an entry about magnetic memory. That, and other things at the time: communicators (cell phones), transporters and warp drive, seemed fanciful and entertaining as most "Trek tech" is, and most likely impossible - or, a long ways off - from when I read it.
I once again, stand pleasantly corrected.
The smallest magnetic-memory bit ever made—an aggregation of just 12 iron atoms created by researchers at IBM—shows the ultimate limits of future data-storage systems.
As the semiconductor industry bumps up against the limits of scaling by making memory and computation devices ever smaller, the IBM Almaden research group, led by Andreas Heinrich, is working from the other end, building computing elements atom-by-atom in the lab.
However, making a realistic technology was not the aim of the current work, says Heinrich. His aim is to explore whether other kinds of computing elements can be made from a few atoms, perhaps by embracing quantum. "We have to have the foresight not to worry about the next step, but to jump to something potentially revolutionary," he says.
As the semiconductor industry bumps up against the limits of scaling by making memory and computation devices ever smaller, the IBM Almaden research group, led by Andreas Heinrich, is working from the other end, building computing elements atom-by-atom in the lab.
However, making a realistic technology was not the aim of the current work, says Heinrich. His aim is to explore whether other kinds of computing elements can be made from a few atoms, perhaps by embracing quantum. "We have to have the foresight not to worry about the next step, but to jump to something potentially revolutionary," he says.
Technology Review: Magnetic Memory Miniaturized to Just 12 Atoms
IBM: Almaden Research Lab
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