Part of a article exploring future computing and storage.
Organic films
The University of Arizona's Optical Data Storage Center has provided US$2 million in funding for the molecular memory work. Dror Sarid, director of the center, and optical scientist Ghassan E. Jabbour are pioneering theory and experiments that are leading the way to very fast, low-cost and compact memory devices.
Sarid and Jabbour believe that nanotech organic films will be the data storage medium of the near future, using millions of microelectronic arms (also known as MEMS probes) to read and write data in clusters of molecules on the film.
The scientists are developing an idea that originated with IBM and Stanford University researchers. It combines silicon-based microelectronics with micromachining technology. Sarid and Jabbour have demonstrated their version of a MEMS probe that employs a cantilever to deliver pulses of electric current as the tip of the probe "taps" on a surface. The cantilever's injected current changes the electric resistance at the point where it contacts the surface and writes data.
"In principle, one should have no trouble in making a million cantilevers operate in parallel in the MEMS probe," Sarid says. "After all, Pentium processors in computers have millions of transistors, and this is much simpler than a transistor. And Jabbour has the expertise to fabricate nano-thick organic thin films for low-cost memory."
