Date: 16/01/2012

IBM's next path in nanotech: Atom level

When the leading semiconductor fabs such as TSMC and GLOBALFOUNDRIES (tech supported by IBM) having bugs in achieving good production yield at 28nm and 22nm, material research team at IBM is going in different direction by dealing the material at atomic level, particularly the magnetic material used to store the hard disk drives . IBM claims it just need 12 atoms to store a bit of data. So that the storage capacity can be increased 100 times compared to present storage in magnetic disk drives.

We're taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit -- single atoms -- to build computing devices one atom at a time. said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research - Almaden, in California.

The scientists at IBM Research used a scanning tunneling microscope to atomically engineer a grouping of twelve antiferromagnetically coupled atoms that stored a bit of data for hours at low temperatures.

Electronics Engineering Herald

Writing and reading a magnetic byte: The picture above shows a magnetic byte imaged 5 times in different magnetic states to store the ASCII code for each letter of the word THINK