The Arrival of Nanotech Memories
Roland Piquepaille writes "After the ages of DRAM and SRAM memories, is this time for nanotech memories? ExtremeTech says that "molecular memories" as well as memories based on carbon nanotubes are emerging. With these nanotech memories, several startup companies are envisioning future chips mixing logic, memory and reconfigurable computing elements. One of these promising startups is ZettaCore, which was mentioned several times here more for its investors than for its technology. The company has built a prototype of a molecular memory designed to replace both SRAM and DRAM kinds of memories. These molecules, which are about 1 nanometer in size, are also self-assembling, meaning that they can be manufactured with existing equipment used in the semiconductor industry. This overview contains more details about the technology and includes a diagram of these molecules in a memory array."
March 24th, 2004 at 1:12 PM
A paper describing how it works
The chemistry is zinc porphyrin rather than rotaxane or catenane. There is a paper online about how it works. The paper's authors are probably connected somehow with the ZettaCore principals. Interesting stuff.
March 25th, 2004 at 7:17 AM
Lots of molecular electronics companies
It is worth noting that CALMEC has been around for quite some time and has a very interesting molecular memory/switch based on chiropticene. So it would appear that there are multiple molecular models competing for idea space and what is needed are things like access times, molecular stability, memory storage density, etc. i.e. the standard figures of merit that one applies to traditional storage mediums.