Diamonds Used To Increase Density, Performance of Phase-Change Memory 115
Lucas123 writes "Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown they can increase the density, performance and the durability of phase-change memory (PSM) by using diamonds to change the base alloy material. Instead of using the more typical method of applying heat to the alloy to change its state from amorphous to crystalline, thereby laying down bits in the material, the researchers used pressure from diamond-tipped tools. Using pressure versus heat allowed them to slow down the change in order to produce many varying states allowing more data to be stored on the alloy. 'This phase-change memory is more stable than the material used in current flash drives. It works 100 times faster and is rewritable millions of times,' said the study's lead author, Ming Xu, a doctoral student at the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. 'Within about five years, it could also be used to replace hard drives in computers and give them more memory.'"
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I read /. uncensored for the trolls and such. Usually there's some larfs
Perhaps, not today.
Same here. This may be the lamest troll thread I've ever seen on /.
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And like a DDOS it's still ongoing right now, in many if not all new submissions. This freak has serious issues. Other sites have been poisoned earlier, like answers.yahoo.com (google "gamemakerdom").
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I hope you have large lungs and efficient oxygen uptake. I don't. I can see writing on the wall, and this ain't Facebook. The fact that it's gone on for many days now in spite of people modding and flagging tells me that the staff is asleep at the wheel or has another agenda. A captain asleep at the wheel means the ship will run aground or hit an iceberg. I'm abandoning ship before that happens.
Boring (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Boring not tunneling (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Boring not tunneling (Score:5, Insightful)
Gem grade consumer diamonds can be created in the lab as well. Up to 25 carats has been done, if memory serves me. There are tell tale signs usually, although I won't call them differences. Those diamonds still are diamonds, but tend to fluoresce in ways that mined diamonds would only do when they are a specific color variation like blue diamonds. Also, the labs are playing ball with the mining cartels and making sure that they inscribe serial numbers on their stones, so you know it was lab created.
Long story short, if there was a need to suddenly have to produce a lot of gem quality diamonds to save the Earth or something, you wouldn't have to rely on DeBeers to mine them for you. They wouldn't necessarily be cheap, but they would be a hell of a lot less expensive than current diamond prices.
Re:Boring not tunneling (Score:4, Informative)
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"Five years", eh...?
I'd better start planning my migration then. Not.
All Chinese authors (Score:3)
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Well, when you've got a billion and a third people, a history of oppressing intellectuals, and a (relatively) immigration-friendly neighbor, these things happen.
Re:All Chinese authors (Score:5, Informative)
http://usvisa-info.com/en-MX/selfservice/us_immigrant_visas [usvisa-info.com]
Most Chinese students are actually on student visas. They usually get a 1yr extension for work, and from there they go to H1B if hired somewhere, and Green Card if they really want to stay, but that costs a lot to a company so it must be really worth it.
The question is, do most of the Chinese students stay in the US? or do they go back to China and work there?
If this means something: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/28/china-us-publisher-scientific-papers [guardian.co.uk] , I don't think most are staying.
Re:All Chinese authors (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you want to stay in a country that is fairly hostile to the way you look, has a very different culture and set of basic values and generally tends to villify your culture and homeland?
US used to be a place where migrants could actually feel welcome but those times are firmly in the past.
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US used to be a place where migrants could actually feel welcome but those times are firmly in the past.
When, exactly was this?
http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/background-discrimination-against-immigrants [dosomething.org]
You watch too much Fox News (Score:3)
The white non-Catholic population are primarily contained in the Bible Belt. Everywhere else people generally don't care the way you look. Many of them are friendly and adopting to the Chinese culture too. I am not talking about your local chop suey place but things like the idea of Zen, the rising popularity of acupuncture and herbal medicine etc. is a sign of the times.
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It having a different culture doesn't matter, the chinese simply make a new little china in each major city around the globe.
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Re:All Chinese authors (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.S. population is about 13% foreign-born, which is pretty high. Lower than Canada (19%), but higher than most other countries. For example, only 9% of the UK population is foreign-born, 4% of the Italian population, 2% of the Japanese population, and... 0.3% of the Chinese population.
It's not necessarily actually easy to get into the U.S., but overall, a lot of people do so anyway. And unlike many other countries, the U.S. has automatic citizenship from birth, which means any offspring of the foreign-born population (a full 1/8 of the country!) are automatically citizens, which is a much friendlier path to citizenship than most countries have.
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There's also the fact that the the US is not the most desirable place in the world right now. It's better than South America, Africa and most of Asia (including China,) but the current economic conditions makes it difficult to predict the next 3 years. Canada is easier to get into than the US, but it's a huge pain in the ass to play the waiting game, Canada or US.
If the US elects a republican, then prepare to see more regressive tax policies and further erosion of social safety nets. If the US re-elects Oba
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1,000,000,000.33 people
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I sure am glad not to be a third of a person.
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Dwarfism is an unpleasant condition indeed.
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Re:All Chinese authors (Score:5, Insightful)
Discounting the fact that simply because the researchers are not named "John" and "Sally" they must not be American... Contemporary American society does not value education in general and have no respect for science, engineering and R&D. Accordingly we are producing less scientists and engineers. We are investing less into long term R&D on both the public and private sector which further depresses the draw of talent into the fields.
So, I would expect this trend to continue until businesses can stop looking at the next quarter and start looking 10-20+ years down the road. The federal government on the other hand needs to realize that funding blue sky research brings us things like the Internet and we could use more of that too...
In closing we are pretty much hosed as long as we value reality tv, athletics and wealth more than discovery, knowledge and the common good.
Good luck!
- anon
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Nope, they just steal it.
Neal Stephenson hits another one (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Diamond Age in the title of Stephenson's book means that diamond has become a common building material, used whenever you need something durable or transparent. In the book it was accomplished by nanotechnology, i.e. building diamond structures at the atomic level from a supply of carbon atoms. We are nowhere near there yet - metals, plastics and composites are still much cheaper and more plentiful than industrial diamonds.
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Damned Vickys are so tedious...
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Great work, guys! Now, do you have a suggestion on how to put several trillion tiny diamond presses inside my SSD "within about five years"? [xkcd.com]
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That depends on how big they are. Micro-scale machinery (MEMS, but I can't remember what the acronym stands for) might be quite plausible for that. You'd need a really small stepper motor to apply the pressure, and another to do the fine positioning, and a more normal one to do the rough positioning....
Well, maybe not. But I bet we get useful MEMS before we get useful non-chemical nano-tech.
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In the case of Commodore, there was something of an upgrade path by way of their 128, 256, and 512k RAM Expansion Modules. Those showed up in the mid 1980's if memory serves, and have since been surpassed by much larger devices as the cost of RAM has dropped.
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diamonds are forever (Score:2)
Diamonds are forever, SSD is not (Score:2)
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Like pretty much everything else, the value of diamonds is what the market says it is. Gold, for example, is grossly overpriced considering that Osmium can be had for about a third the price, and requires the addition of only 6 atoms to transform to Gold. Given a relatively trivial breakthrough in technology the price of gold will drop 2/3rds in a day.
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I was thinking deuterium atoms. I hadn't looked up the neutron counts, though. Stable gold is 79P 118N, Osmium is 76P, and abundant in 112N-114N. So presumably you'd take 114N, and look to add 3P, 4N, so call that 2 deuterium and 1 tritium.
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A good point. I'll gladly switch to converting tungsten then, about 1000 times more common, and a factor of 10 cheaper than Osmium. Only requires adding two more atoms.
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Gold is not even grossly overpriced. Consider that all the gold ever mined in the history of earth would fill only 3 olympic swimming pools, then compare that to most other metals out there. This is why gold is recycled to an anally scrutinizing degree compared to other metals. Jewelers send in their sweeps (dust off the floor under their workbenches) for gold recovery and money. I have heard a story of a jeweler sending in his RUG to a refinery and getting about 15 thousand due to the amount of gold du
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That actually supports my point. It's grossly overpriced based on an economic premise (rarity) which is easily falsified with a minor improvement in technology.
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Yes, but you have the wrong minor improvement.
Sea water contains enough Uranium to power desalinization and (probably) separation of the residue into separate elements. But the power is probably worth more than the elements recovered (except for a few, like Bromine) so even when it becomes possible it won't be done unless the price becomes considerably higher.
Adding neutrons to atoms is likely to ALWAYS be a more expensive approach, even when it becomes easier than it currently is. And the main real value
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I certainly agree that there are any number of technologies on the horizon which could dramatically disrupt the price of gold.
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World Au production: 2400 tons.
I think it's going to take more than a relatively trivial breakthrough in technology. Maybe if we get hit by a really big asteroid...
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Yeah, someone else pointed out that Os is cheap because it's useless. I substitute tungsten (60,000 tons) as my proposed cheap starter material.
Replaces HDD? Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Replaces HDD? Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
One out of three isn't bad. Okay, so SSDs haven't completely replaced magnetic media, but in some contexts, they have. Nobody carries around floppies these days, and laptops are clearly heading in that direction, too.
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If the BIOS doesn't recognize them then that's a controller failure, not the flash memory.
Maybe you should stop trying to buy the absolute cheapest SSD possible, I"m pretty sure you wouldn't apply that sort of philosophy to other things in life.
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One out of three isn't bad. Okay, so SSDs haven't completely replaced magnetic media, but in some contexts, they have. Nobody carries around floppies these days, and laptops are clearly heading in that direction, too.
So you're saying that soon people will not carry around laptops either? :-)
Re:Replaces HDD? Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
>Does anyone remember "bubble memory"? Is was going to replace magnetic media
No, it wasn't. It was going to replace transistor RAM. In some specialized cases it did but it was expensive. It had a density much greater than TTL RAM but slow, but it had the advantage of being non-volatile.
>Optical drives were going to replace magnetic media.
But they did, for much of removable magnetic media. When was the last time you installed software with floppies? When is the last time you saw someone back things up to floppies? While tape is the gold standard, it's far too expensive for joe-consumer to even consider.
>SSD were going to replace magnetic media.
They have replaced magnetic media all over. What the hell are you talking about? They are spectacular for system drives on desktop computers and netbooks.
>get off your lawn
I remember when talking to a computer meant sitting at a paper TTY and banging out on the keyboard, and stacks of cards.
Get off mine.
--
BMO
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His UID is much lower than yours. I think his lawn wins...
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That's why you use it for a system drive.
You don't store movies and such on it. You have a 2TB external drive for that if you've got an ultraportable or net-top. And heck, at that point, you just buy 5200RPM "green" drives because they're cheaper.
And that way, if you don't feel like lugging around the external drive, you can leave it at home plugged into the server and stream from it over the net.
--
BMO
GST being used in rewritable optical media? (Score:2)
I think this is completely untrue. AFAIK the phase-change material in rewritable optical media is one of several organic dyes, which is largely why there have been issues with rewritable media shelf life and degradation. Assuming I'm right and the author of the linked CW article got that factoid wrong, what else did he get wrong? There seems to be a logical disconnect between any technique requiring pressure from "diamond-tipped tools" to manipulate PSM and promises that it's "100 times faster" and will
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Actually, it is write-once optical media that uses organic dyes, whereas rewritable media (cd-rw, dvd-rw, dvd-ram, etc...) use a phase change metallic alloy. However, I agree with all of your other points about the article.
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I checked my recollection finally, and I stand corrected on that point. I'm still suspicious of the CW article, regardless.
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You mean your recolwikipedialection? Or did you recolgooglelection it to find a real source:)?
Cheers
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No, recolgooglescholarlection. I have it installed as a search engine in Firefox. :-)
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Many Thanks for that!
Cheers!
Question (Score:2)
How does it compete with IBM's racetrack memory for speed and durability?
5 years? (Score:2)
Why is it always 5 years, when 20 are realistic and "never" is also a quite real option?
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It's five years because that creates a sense of urgency for angel investors to get in on the ground floor.
Timeline translation (Score:1)
"Within five years..." - maybe sometime within my life time
"In ten years..." - it's theoretically not unpossible.
Not to degrade research works, but let's get realistic about estimates, eh? You're scientists, you know, not Wall St. hustlers.
more memory (Score:2)
'Within about five years, it could also be used to replace hard drives in computers and give them more memory.'
Oh great, now my backups will take even longer. I hope network speeds get better by then.
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That's what incremental backups are for.
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My balls will be made available to market in 5 years as well. Complete with diamond tipped pubes.
Liar. Everyone knows that cowards have no balls. That includes anonymous ones.
Funded by DeBeers (Score:2)
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Great.... (Score:2)
Plus one geek cred to anyone who knows the quote sans marks
Diamonds are a misdirection: this isn't about them (Score:5, Informative)
This is a fairly standard alloy for PC memory. These are common in next gen memory--look up ovonyx, or current Samsung NOR for a similar technology. And to be fair, most people in the memory industry do think that some sort of FeRAM or ReRAM or PCRAM will be important in 5 years, as a different leg in the memory heirarchy.
In any case, the point of this research was to use diamonds to take a look at the pressure/temperature phase diagram of the alloy. There is no intent or interest in making the material with diamond. Instead, knowing that you can get performance by going to another phase (which isn't simply accessable with tuning temperatures), you can
1) Change out the layer you are growing on
2) Add a stressor layer (Si3N4 is common) and temperature cycle.
3) Do some sort of tricky flash anneal to recrystalize
4) Add a quaternary alloy to improve the phase space.
In short, there will never be diamond involved, unless there is a C stress layer (unlikely).
This is all pretty standard stuff. THe diamond portion is a side note--that is how they applied test pressures. Practical devices may come out of this based on alterations of other sorts
Diamonds (Score:2)