Wonders of memory in miniature

Since the 1960s, every computer engineer could quote Moore's law — that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. But thanks to scientists in Germany, that law is simply out of date. The researchers at IBM have successfully stored a single bit of data on just 12 atoms. Putting their feat in perspective, it currently takes about a million atoms for a single bit of data to be stored on a modern hard disk. A bit can have a value of zero or one and is the most basic form of information in computation.According to the researchers, the technique opens up the possibility of producing much denser forms of magnetic computer memory than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. "Roughly every two years hard drives become denser," research lead author Sebastian Loth said in London yesterday. "The obvious question to ask is how long can we keep going. And the fundamental physical limit is the world of atoms." Using that logic, Loth and his team examined just how many atoms are needed to store one bit. Researchers were able to form a byte made of eight of the 12-atom bits. A new iPhone 4S, for example, can hold 32 gigabytes of memory — or 32,000,000,000 bytes. It's estimated that there are 5,070,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a 50ml teaspoon of water. It will likely be years before the development has a practical application.