alt Hacker News447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
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The concept is interesting, but I'm getting a lot of red flags from this - there's no experimental data or proof-of-concept work at all, which makes this feel more like a blue-sky "Look what we could do if we could arrange atoms however we wanted!" pipe dream in the Drexlerian mode. Something about the writing style's also pinging my LLM radar, which while not disqualifying in-and-of-itself is very discouraging in combination with the other funkiness. The chemistry and manufacturability strike me as questionable in particular, and I'm not convinced the physics of reading and writing are nearly as clean as the author seems to think.
(I'm also unclear how the bit is supposed to actually flip under the applied electric charge without the fluorine and carbon having to pass through each other.)
This is a pipe dream and I’m almost tempted to say a fever dream. The chemistry part seems somewhat sound, even though that’s outside of my field of expertise. But the entire readout process is questionable, and has clear signs of heavy AI writing.
The AFM mechanism described as “tier 1” (very strong LLMism, btw) is somewhat optimistic but realistic. The fields needed are large compared to usual values in solid state devices, but I’d guess achievable with an AFM. But “tier 2” is vague and completely speculative. Some random things I noted: - handwaving that (not exact quote) “the read controller is cached. No need to read the same bit twice”. Cached with what?? If this miraculous technology can achieve 25 PB/s, what can possibly hope to cache it? More generally, it’s a strange thing to point out. - some magic and completely handwaved MEMS array that converts an 8um spot size laser beam into atomic-resolution 2D addressing? In my opinion this is the biggest sin of the manuscript. What I understood to be depicted is just fundamentally physically impossible. - a general misunderstanding of integrated electronics, and dishonest benchmarking, comparing real memory technologies being sold at scale right now, vs theoretical physical bounds on an untested idea. Also no mention of existing magnetic tape as far as I can tell. - constantly pulling out specific numbers or estimates with no citation and insufficient justification. Too many examples to even count.
I’m sorry for the harsh language, I wouldn’t use it for a usual review. But in my opinion this needs a very heavy toning down and complete rewrite, and is unfit for a proper review. Final remark: electronics is, and will always fundamentally be, intrinsically denser than optics. Some techniques “described” here, if they were possible, would have been applied to existing optical tech (i.e. phase change materials in blue-ray).
Sniff test: a paper with a single author and 53 revisions, listing a gmail address as contact information despite the author, after a brief internet search, appearing to have affiliations with CSU Global, (maybe) the University of Central Florida, and the San Jose State University Department of Aerospace.
"A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude."
Does that mean a scanning tunneling microscope is the I/O mechanism? That's been demoed for atom-level storage in the past. But it's too slow for use.
Perhaps title had a typo?
fluorographane -> Fluorographene
Can't find a single page about fluorographane
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fluorographane&t...
But this
Remarkable. If this material works and is flexible enough, we could someday see tape drives with hundreds of exabytes of capacity.
The Now I Get non-technical version, because I need someone to explain this to me x)
https://nowigetit.us/pages/d7f94fd0-e608-47f9-8805-429898105...
Too long, not gonna read. When do I get my 447TB iPhone?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as proven by the number of comments treating the paper as an AI slop pipe dream.
Yeah, I've been baited by "breakthroughs" in storage technology for almost 40 years at this point [1]. I'll believe it when it's in Best Buy. Battery "breakthroughs" have really taken up the mantle of headline-grabbing research fund-raising articles so it's nice to see a throwback to the OG: storage.
[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1991/06/23/holograms-the-ne...
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Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.
Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you can write it? It has to be durable under adverse conditions. It has to be practical to manufacture the medium and the drives. You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write. By the time most of these problems are worked out, most of these technologies aren't a whole lot better than existing tech.
Stick this on the "Wouldn't it be nice if graphene..." pile.