from the will-it-help-me-to-remember? dept.
Now, an international team of researchers—including researchers from Oxford University's Department of Materials, the University of Münster, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Exeter—has produced the world's first all-photonic nonvolatile memory chip. The new device uses the phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST)—the same as that used in rewritable CDs and DVDs—to store data. This material can be made to assume an amorphous state, like glass, or a crystalline state, like a metal, by using either electrical or optical pulses. In a paper published in Nature Photonics, the researchers describe the device they've created, which uses a small section of GST on top of a silicon nitride ridge, known as a waveguide, to carry light.
The team has shown that intense pulses of light sent through the waveguide can carefully change the state of the GST. An intense pulse causes it to momentarily melt and quickly cool, causing it to assume an amorphous structure; a slightly less-intense pulse can put it into an crystalline state.
Later, when light with much lower intensity is sent through the waveguide, the difference in the state of the GST affects how much light is transmitted. The team can measure that difference to identify its state—and in turn read off the presence of information in the device as a 1 or 0. 'This is the first ever truly non-volatile integrated optical memory device to be created,' explains Clarendon Scholar and DPhil student Carlos Ríos, one of two lead authors of the paper along with Matthias Stegmaier. 'And we've achieved it using established materials that are known for their long-term data retention—GST remains in the state that it's placed in for decades.'
What's the most likely application for this power, AI, VR, or other?
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Researchers at three different schools have created a microprocessor that integrates transistors and photonic components for on-chip communication:
In the paper – "Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light" – researchers from UC Berkeley, University of Colorado, and MIT report fabricating an electronic–photonic system on a single chip integrating over 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components that work together to provide logic, memory, and interconnect functions. Most significantly, they did it with standard CMOS manufacturing techniques.
Talking about the impact of the work, Miloš Popovic a co-author on the study from the University of Colorado told HPCwire, "This work is directly aimed at the energy problem in supercomputers. It will enable reducing the communication energy by about an order of magnitude, and will make communication energy independent of distance of a link — up to 100's of meters. So, it's definitely part of the exascale computing story."
The chip was fabricated using a commercial high-performance 45-nm complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. The authors write: "No changes to the foundry process were necessary to accommodate photonics and all optical devices were designed to comply with the native process-manufacturing rules. This 'zero-change' integration enables high-performance transistors on the same chip as optics, reuse of all existing designs in the process, compatibility with electronics design tools, and manufacturing in an existing high-volume foundry."
[...] The new chip has a bandwidth density of 300 gigabits per second per square millimeter, about 10 to 50 times greater than packaged electrical-only microprocessors currently on the market.
The big news is the relative ease of manufacture. "This "zero change" approach to integration enables complex electronic-photonic systems on chip to be designed today, in an advanced CMOS foundry. This means high yield, immediate transition to volume production, and the most advanced transistors of any photonic chip (and the largest number of them). These qualities should open up research into systems on chip in many applications including RF signal processing, radar/lidar applications, sensing and imaging, etc.
The authors note, "By showing that a microprocessor with photonic I/O is possible to build today, we're illustrating the power of this approach. Incidentally, while we expected photonic devices to not perform as well using this approach as using fabrication customized to photonics, it turns out that in a number of cases they perform better — leveraging the high resolution implant masks, controlled sub-100nm CMOS deep UV lithography, and rich set of material and mask levels available in CMOS."
Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light (DOI: 10.1038/nature16454)
Related: Light-based Memory Chip is the First Ever to Store Data Permanently
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2015, @11:16PM
If the material used is the same as in DVDs, and they are not permanent (how long they are stable is not known last I looked), how does this tech end up permanent?
Long(ish) term - ok. Permanent - it remains to be seen.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday September 23 2015, @11:34PM
Well, if they etch it into stone and use an external laser to read it, it would probably last just about forever in the literal sense of the word. Certainly longer than the technology available to read the discs.
But, somehow I suspect that the technology will be less durable than that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @12:10AM
The reason that CDs, DVDs, and the like suffer bit rot is usually due to two different process that are not related to this material. The one that most people know of is that the dye in the disks breaks down over time and, once it hits a certain threshold, the player cannot distinguish between what is a pit and what is a land. The second, is that the actual track layer oxidizes, which causes two things: 1 is that the player may not be able to follow the track even if the pits and lands are good; and 2, can make it hard to distinguish pits and a land, even on pressed disks.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday September 23 2015, @11:19PM
Pornography.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday September 23 2015, @11:21PM
sure, its no different than using floppy disks or cds or dvds or worms or blu rays or hd discs for VR.
what does VR have to do with anything?
this will probably get placed in a sandisk player or something and have a bunch of songs that we won't be able to accidentally erase, but installed in a car or something so that we have to buy a bunch of them to prevent us from using a cloud to save on storage or something.
"In theory, that means we could read and write to thousands of bits at once, providing virtually unlimited bandwidth," explains Professor Wolfram Pernice of the University of Munster.
well, my CD player was doing pretty good with the amount of bits it played at once. my solid state disk drive is able to go like 4 terabits if I change the MB to mb and write it the way they suggest.
The fact they can do thousands of bits at once!
kilo-bits! thousands of bits! TENS OF THOUSANDS of bits! Can it do TERBO BITS? 21.6kbps? dude that is like so dial-up that i bet they are putting this into a dell!
I guess there is supposed to be something impressive about unlimited bandwidth of 21.6kbps, but it sounds more like they are trying to sell us a phone with a limited amount of data on the contract on a cow colored computer or something.
then we'll find out it's going to be universally serial and requires a whole 25 pins over the traditional 9, because it needs a dedicated clock signal because it goes so fast, and dedicated chips for the UART to allow for high speeds. I think thunderbolt did that too, right? So we can get a thunderbolt to 25 pin serial adapter and jack into cyberspace--that is where the VR must come in.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 23 2015, @11:28PM
I am now imagining a floppy disk sized (such as 1.44 MB) procedural generation experiment for VR.
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(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday September 24 2015, @09:45PM
If we get to that point, I'll have you know I found my LS-120 drive yesterday evening. I bet it still doesn't work--it was difficult to get drivers because the OEM pointed to the computer vendor and the computer vendor pointed to the OEM.
What happened is the desktop support staff where I worked decided to reimage everything that they had with the drives in them, and did not make a backup of the working image, nor test the ls-120 drive first.
All new pcs were loaded with the image and none of the ls-120s worked. So they ended up replacing them with a faceplate instead. And now I have one, for what good it does. I was given one because someone heard I liked computers. Those were the days.
Be thankful I didn't propose we use IBM 8" diskettes (I have one framed nearby my desk). At 256 bytes per sector, the Diskette2 stored 568KB!
Much more capable than those lowly 360kb diskettes!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2015, @11:44PM
- Are they rewritable?
- Is this supposed to be more durable than optical discs?
- How they figure it will last for decades?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday September 24 2015, @12:25AM
The only truly durable and permant storage medium I know about is clay tablets [wikipedia.org]. We have tablets in museums that are 5000 years old and we can still read them! Once baked (and don't drop them), they'll last until the sun goes dark. Our distant ancestors will be picking those clay tablets out of the ruins of our museums while the rest of the information in our libraries and archives has been turned to dust and ashes.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @12:29AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @03:40AM
Their trade secret tech [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday September 24 2015, @01:23AM
The original CD format was extremely stable, and would probably last multiple thousands of years if not broken. It consisted of a thin layer of gold sandwiched between two sheets of glass (shaped like a disk). Writing was done with a strong laser that was tuned to vaproize the gold, leaving a pit (or, IIRC, in one version leaving a hole). You read the disk with a lower powered laser operating at a different wavelength. AFAICT this should last indefinitely if you don't break it, sand the surface, or some such. And surface mars could be polished away (though only a limited number of times).
Do remember that MOST clay tablets didn't outlast a decade.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Z-A,z-a,01234 on Thursday September 24 2015, @07:03AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Physical_details [wikipedia.org]
It seems there is a form of glass called "polycarbonate plastic". It is rumored to last forever!
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 24 2015, @03:40AM
You'd be better off using braille pressed into metal plates. Those are basically indestructible as long as you don't melt them or purposefully crush them.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday September 24 2015, @03:41PM
Rust.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 24 2015, @03:51PM
Right, because all metals rust...
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 24 2015, @01:35AM
Since it uses the same material as CR-RWs and DVD-RWs, does it have the same lousy data density as those too? Even if they get the same density as a BD-R, on a chip that's still probably much less than 1GB of storage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @10:22AM
Other.
The most likely application will be data storage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @03:27PM
This same organization put the same GST material between transparent electrodes and drew pictures on it. The images persisted after the electrical current was turned off.
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-07-10-nano-pixels-promise-thin-flexible-high-res-displays [ox.ac.uk]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 24 2015, @11:03PM
This is supposed to be memory, right? Not storage? What is the actual and theoretical data density? Power used for read/write? Speed of read/write? Max bandwidth? Random access speed? Fragility? Heat waste (do you really need something that selectively melts on your motherboard)?
>GST remains in the state that it's placed in for decades
That's pretty good for special archival purposes, if nothing else.
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