Ferroelectric Storage Density Tops 20KDVDs/Cubit^2

DeAshcroft writes "As reported in Technology Research News, researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation have demonstrated a prototype ferroelectric (as opposed to ferromagnetic) storage mechanism with density of 1.5 trillion dots per square inch. No word on why Japanese researchers are using square inches, but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit. Original paper appeared in the Applied Physics Letters."

In related memory news, an Anonymous Coward writes "It appears the the ever present pause between photo's on a digital camera might finally be fixed. A company now claims http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C1396/ ) to have kicked up the write speed on a compact flash card up to 4MB/sec. This means we lesser photographers can now get the right action shot just by volume alone ;-)"

Those Japs love their cartoon porn.

Yeah, who else who measure in inches except the US and porn stars ?

Re:Is this really important?

Do we really need that much storage?

$GENERIC_QUOTE_640K

Video takes up a lot. Try storing multi-channel (multiple camera angles) uncompessed HDTV, gigs soon add up. Mix in some form of holographic projection and a dash of libraries of congress and you eat up terrabytes.

Re:Is this really important?

Most people don't. Anyone doing video or audio stuff do.

I make music in my spare time. All the source files, sample libraries and raw audio of one single track won't fit on a CD anymore, even though the final track will only be something like a five megabyte mp3/ogg.

Storage is like money, if you have enough you don't think about it too much. That way you end up with more time to do what you really want to :)

Riiiiiiiight, what's a cubit?

Let's see,I used to know what a cubit was. Well, don't you worry about that, get some wood, build it.

When cubits get to small we can start measuring things in "arks".

KFG

Re:Riiiiiiiight, what's a cubit?

"Noah! Both of those DB9 connectors are Female, you have to go back and get another one!"
"Aw, come on! Can't you just use a gender changer?"
"You know I don't work like that."

Re:Square cubit?

Why the US still clings to imperial units is beyond me.

Duh. It's because Americans still measure everything in shitloads.

Re:Square cubit?

Why the US still clings to imperial units is beyond me.

Actually, for the simple reason that they're what the technological world was built on, and also the not-inconsequential fact that English units often tend to relate to the real-world better than thier Metric/SI counterparts.

This is NOT just an artifact caused by familiarity: For ordinary use, the English units are often just more convenient because thier sizes are more applicable to the problem at hand. For instance, in machining and design of precision parts, thousandths of an inch turn out to be considerably more useful than metric units, just simply because of the mechanics of material removal using common machining processes. This is one reason almost all machining in high-precision industries like Aerospace and Oil/Petrochemical/Energy is still done in English units. (Note that the recent NASA Mars probe debacle only happened when one group deviated from accepted industry practice of using English measurements and switched to Metric. (And without even telling anyone, at that!) The simple reason the error was not caught is that no idiot (except maybe a French idiot, they still haven't got over thier Napoleonic pride in the moronic Metric system) would use metric measurements in an aerospace context - it's just not done.)

Another good example of the oh-so-awkward size of metric units is the liters/100km unit that has to be used to measure fuel econonomy in reasonably sized numbers. Ugh. There are dozens of other examples.

Units are somewhat arbitrary, but to be honest, in my engineering career, I've seen many more errors with Metric units (decimal point errors, imagine that!) than I have with the English system.

HELP STAMP OUT THE METRIC SYSTEM!

P.S.: Of course, what we really need to adopt is a correct measurement system based on Dublins, that perfect unit of length between a yard and a meter, where the acceleration of gravity here on earth would be 10 Dublins/s^2. Physics and engineering students worldwide would celebrate my birthday with fireworks and parties. :-)

Re:Square cubit?

Actually, for the simple reason that they're what the technological world was built on, and also the not-inconsequential fact that English units often tend to relate to the real-world better than thier Metric/SI counterparts.

Actually, this is a typical case of YMMV. If you've been using Imperial units all your life, SI units will seem awkward and unnatural. But it's the same the other way around. Your story can be reversed, situated in a Metric country, and it'll still be true.

Another good example of the oh-so-awkward size of metric units is the liters/100km unit that has to be used to measure fuel econonomy in reasonably sized numbers

Incorrect. It's perfectly feasible to use the 1 liter in x kilometers metric (abbreviated to 1:x). Which even yields an easy rule-of-thumb conversion to/from mpg: 10 mpg = 1:3.

And talk about awkward. How many feet go into a mile? How many lbs into a ton? With a bazillion conversion factors to choose from (rather than the trivial move-the-decimal-point operation needed with metric units), it's a miracle the Industrial Revolution got off the ground at all.

the recent NASA Mars probe debacle only happened when one group deviated from accepted industry practice...

This isn't an argument in favor of using Imperial measurements, it's an argument in favor of standardizing. The US is one of IIRC three holdouts [*] on adopting the SI (the acronym isn't accidental). Give it up!

*: Talk about the Axis of Evil...

What?!?

They measure storage density in DVDs now?!?

Re:What?!?

Why not? Remember when we measured everything in terms of floppies? I still remember being told that a CD could hold as much data as 444 floppies. (A number like that tends to stick in the old brain.)

shz/in^2

sure, that sounds like a lot of storage, but how many full-length german sheizer films can it hold? when will we start setting standards that are actually meaninful?

Cubit^2

Cubit^2

This sounds like an achievement of biblical proportions!

Cubits?

What the hell, is God telling them to build an ark?

Re:Cubits?

"... and He told Noah to put on the ark every kind of web page, two of every kind."

Re:Cubits?

And so Noah's Archive was born

Inches? Cubits?

For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.

Re:Inches? Cubits?

For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.

That's 2,412.1 petanybbles per acre, for those of you who prefer units with a little character. ;-)

Re:Inches? Cubits?

If you want a little character, that should be 2.035e-2 Library of Congresses per cm^2. ;-)

Re:Inches? Cubits?

Or about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits per square parsec.
That's 31 zeros.

-

Read speed a bit low

I hope that they could use several head in parallel at the same time to increase the reading speed and also (why not?) the writing speed.

If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.

I wonder why it hasn't be done with HDD?

Note that I'm not talking about multiple heads (too expensive), but using one head to read/write several tracks at the same time.

My DVD...

...gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it.

Really now, the Japanese are using square inches because Americans know what a square inch is, and they do a lot of business with the USA. Seems pretty obvious to me.

Also, they just happened to reach a "milestone" of 1.5 when measured in square inches. 1 square inch = 6.4516 square centimeters, so this is only about 0.235 per square centimeter. Maybe they should have a press release at 0.3/cm^2. But if it's less than 1, it's just not very good.

To resolve this issue, I propose the introduction of a new unit based on the meter and corrected by a factor based on Moore's law or whatever it is that governs storage density. The correction factor should be adjusted to allow for press releases oh... say... every 3 months so that stock traders will have something to speculate about. I propose that the new units be called "Horcs" in honor of no particular person, place or thing.

Libraries of Congress

Anyone happen to know what this is in standard measurements - as in, Libraries of Congress per 8.5"x11"?

Simpler units

The recoring area of a DVD is 14 square inches. So the density of this new recording technique is 14*47=658 times greater than a DVD.

Transfer speed?

What I'd be interrested in is knowing how fast it reads, preferably in another sane measurement, like 8" floppies per forthnight.

The really interesting bits, no pun intended

First, they're only currently able to read 25kB/s. Yes, 25 kilobytes per second. They think they can bump up the read speed to 3.75MB/s. But it's the write speed that's curious. The prototype writes at 2.5MB/s, and they estimate they can bump it up to 125MB/s. A medium we can write to faster than we can read!

Second, their goal is 667 terabits per cm^2. Yep, about 2667 times more dense than the 250 gigabits per cm^2 they're claiming.

Confused which cubits where used

Are those cubits persianroyalcubits, northerncubits, irishcubits, greekcubits, hebrewcubits, homericcubits, olympiccubits, sumeriancubits, egyptianroyalcubits, blackcubits, shortgreekcubits, biblicalcubits, egyptianshortcubits, romancubits, assyriancubits or hashimicubits ??

Ferroelectricity

I'm not familiar with ferroelectricity. It sounds as if the pickup device is like a scanning tunneling microscope, with an AC field on the point to measure the impedance of an adjacent ferroelectric domain. They claim that there is a change in the impedance of the domain depending on its electrical orientation, and that they can flip these domains electricaly (presumably with the same device that reads them, I guess by putting a higher voltage pulse through it). They claim that ferroelectric materials are piezoelectric, and that they are distorting the crystal lattice to store information.

So, is all this for real?

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Ferroelectricity

Ferroelectricity is quite analoguous to ferromagnetism (they borrow the name even, there is no iron in typical ferroelectrics). Ferroelectric is a subset of piezoelectrics; ferroelectric's polarization can be switch by either applying an electric field or mechanical stress. OTOH, piezoelectrics' polarization is unchangeable. Piezoelectric effect refers to the behavior when the material is under stress, charge appears in the surface of the material (piezo comes from pressure in Greek). It sounds like they are inducing 90 deg domain switching as storage. One problem I can already see with this is fatigue; because of polarization of the material, there is a dramatic change of sizes of domains undergo 90 deg switches (on the order of 0.001). So they either got a material that is very soft, like PVDF or something like that, or the macroscopic behavior of all these bits just even out the stresses.

Density expanded

Ferroelectric density: 1.5Tb/in^2
8 bits to a byte -> 187.5GB/in^2

Hitachi's (formerly IBM's) 180GXP line packs 60GB to a platter. According to their data sheet [hgst.com], that is 45.5Gb/in^2. Convert to GB, and we have ~5.69GB/in^2.

When common HD technology reaches Ferroelectric technology, we'll have about 6TB in a top-of-the-line IDE drive.

Cho Lab Homepage

His lab is here [tohoku.ac.jp]. Please try to stagger your access so you don't slashdot him.

The Japanese side of the main Phonon Device Lab has pdf'd scans of newspaper articles from September 10. The Japanese also uses 1.4 Terabits/sq. inch.

A drawing on the bottom of this page [tohoku.ac.jp] shows that his ultimate goal of 4 Petabits/square inch is based on a bit being stored in a 0.4 nanometer square, the size of one BaTiO3 crystal.

Interesting experiment [tohoku.ac.jp] on his page tells you in English how to make piezoelectric ceramics(in collaboration with Washington U.).

It looks like there are a whole raft [washington.edu] of people from Tohoku U. at U. Washington doing nano-bio research, mems, piezoelectrics.. maybe sq. inch came from Washington. Their Center for Nanotechnology [washington.edu] looks neat.
I wonder if they were involved in this storage technology development.