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Animatsyesterday at 9:49 PM1 replyview on HN

"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.


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iliatoliyesterday at 9:51 PM

Yes, Tier 1 is scanning probe — C-AFM specifically. Slow but sufficient for proof of concept. The paper describes a Tier 2 architecture using near-field mid-IR arrays for parallel read/write, projecting 25 PB/s aggregate throughput. Tier 1 proves the physics. Tier 2 is the engineering path to speed.

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