Billions
of tiny mechanical levers could be used to store songs on future
MP3 players and pictures on digital cameras.
As bizarre as the idea might sound, researchers at a Dutch company
have already demonstrated that miniscule mechanical switches
can be used to store data using less power than existing technologies
and with greater reliability.
Nanomech memory, developed by Cavendish Kinetics in the Netherlands,
stores data using thousands of electro-mechanical switches that
are toggled up or down to represent either a one or zero as
a binary bit. Each switch is a few microns long and less than
a micron wide - roughly a hundred times smaller than the width
of a human hair.
Existing computer memory typically stores data as an electrical
or magnetic charge. Cavendish Kinetics claims Nanomech memory
can read and write data using 100 times less power than such
systems, and works up to 1000 times faster. It is also much
more resilient to both temperature and radiation, the company
claims.
Intermolecular forces
Nanomech memory incorporates hundreds of thousands of conductive
metal levers, each just a few microns long. These are created
by lithographically etching a design onto a template and then
chemically dissolving away unwanted layers.
Introducing a miniscule voltage to an electrode below a lever
causes it to bend forwards until it makes contact. Thanks to
intermolecular forces on this scale, once flipped, a lever will
also maintain its position, even when the voltage is switched
off. The trick can be reversed by applying voltage to an electrode
on the other side of the lever. And the state of each switch
flips can be sensed easily by the electrodes themselves.
Repeating the feat across thousands of switches makes it possible
to store something as complex as a computer program in Nanomech
memory.
Cavendish Kinetic has so far developed a unit capable of storing
256 kilobytes of data, or around two million individual bits.
This is suitable for simple microcontrollers - the tiny computers
used to operate commonplace electric motors found, for example,
in cars and consumer electronics products.
Gigabyte memory
But eventually the company hopes to stack many more levers together,
boosting memory capacity to several gigabytes. "That's
the long term aim," says Charles Smith at Cambridge University,
UK, who is a chief technology officer at Cavenish Kinetics.
"We want to put millions and millions on an individual
chip."
This should make Nanomech memory a viable solution for portable
music players and digital cameras. And it could improve battery
life dramatically.
"The big growth area for large scale non-volatile memory
devices is portable consumer applications, such as iPods and
cameras," says Jim Miles, another nanotechnology researcher
at Manchester University, UK. "And for these devices, power
consumption is the big issue."
Miles, however, points out that it is vital to be able to repeatedly
read and write to this type of memory. "It's important
to know rewrite speeds as well as how many rewrite cycles they
can survive," he says.
Smith says the first increased capacity Nanomech chips should
be available by the end of 2006. He adds that the memory technology's
resilience to radiation should also make it suitable for use
aboard satellites and other spacecraft. This is because cosmic
radiation can cause space-borne computers to suddenly malfunction
by flipping bits stored in memory.
This story was printed from ZDNet News,
located at http://news.zdnet.com
By Alorie Gilbert
URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5761537.html
The
risk of an attack related to a flaw in Microsoft Outlook Express
climbed this week, after underground hacking sites began circulating
sample code for exploiting it.
The exploit, which the French Security Incident Response Team
drew attention to on Monday, is designed to take complete control
of PCs with certain versions of the Outlook Express e-mail program
installed on them, when users visit newsgroups controlled by
the hackers.
But security experts said the risk of a widespread attack is
low, because people must visit the malicious newsgroups for
an attack to work. In addition, the exploit code that's in circulation
has some glitches, said Michael Sutton, a lab director at security
company iDefense.
"It requires a reasonable amount of user intervention,
which lowers the overall risk," Sutton said.
Nonetheless, iDefense urges people with vulnerable machines
to install the patch Microsoft released last week to fix the
flaw. The problem stems from a component of Outlook's newsreader
program called Network News Transfer Protocol. The result of
an attack could be serious.
"An attacker could install programs; view, change or delete
data; or create new accounts with full user rights," Microsoft
warned in a security bulletin for the patch last week. The company
rated the vulnerability "important," which falls second
to "critical" in its rating scale.
A Microsoft representative said the company is aware of the
exploit code but is unaware of active attacks that have utilized
it. Microsoft is monitoring the situation and is urging customers
to apply its patch, the representative said. The company also
directed people to report any attacks to Microsoft and the FBI.
The vulnerability has been found in several versions of Outlook
Express, including releases 5.5 and 6.0 for Windows 2000, XP
and Server 2003 machines, according to Microsoft. People don't
have to launch the Outlook Express program, however, in order
to fall victim to an attack.
