Universal Memory

摘要

Nantero CEO Greg Schmergel holds a circular wafer of silicon, about the size of a compact disc, sealed in an acrylic container. It's a piece of hardware that stores 10 billion bits of digital information, but what's remarkable about it is the way it does it. Each bit is encoded not by the electric charge on a circuit element, as in conventional electronic memory, nor by the direction of a magnetic field, as in hard drives, but by the physical orientation of nanoscale structures. This technology could eventually allow vastly greater amounts of data to be stored on computers and mobile devices. Experts estimate that within 20 years, you may be able to fit the content of all the DVDs ever made on your laptop computer or store a digital file containing every conversation you have ever had on a handheld device.