IBM's Computing Breakthrough Promises Chips The Size Of Dust
IBM on Thursday announced two major breakthroughs in nanotechnology that could increase computers' data storage capacity by a factor of 1,000 and decrease the size of computer chips to no larger than a speck of dust.
"On your iPod, if this were turned into a product, it could store about 1,000 times more information," said IBM scientist Cyrus Hirjibehedin. IBM estimates that such a device could store the entire contents of YouTube, about 1,000 trillion bits of data.
The state of the art for data density today is about 200 to 300 gigabits per square inch. A gigabit equals one billion bits.