A leak of information
"Pavlo Zubko and Jean-Marc Triscone"
As capacitors, the ubiquitous components of electronic circuitry, get smaller, keeping them insulating is a challenge. But that’s not necessarily bad news — some conductivity might be just the thing for data storage.
Figure 1 | An approach to data storage. IBM’s Millipede project involves a technique, depicted here in an artist’s impression, for reading and writing data that consists of operating, in parallel, an array of atomic-force-microscopy cantilevers with sharp tips. Just as punch cards were used in the first computers, the tips are used to punch nanometre-scale indentations, representing the ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ of binary information, into a silicon chip coated with a thin plastic film. Garcia and colleagues’ demonstration1 of the operation of a single tip to read and write ferroelectric domains could begeneralized to use a similar array of cantilevers.
Pavlo Zubko and Jean-Marc Triscone are in the
Department of Condensed Matter Physics,
University of Geneva, 24 Quai Ernest-Ansermet,
CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland.
e-mails: pavlo.zubko@unige.ch;
jean-marc.triscone@unige.ch
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