Linked by Flatland_Spider on Fri 21st Nov 2008 13:28 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems What's after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The EE Times has a more detailed write up as well as WebIndia, TopNews.in, Eureka Alert, and Small Times.
Permalink for comment 338038
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Dynamic Memory
by Michael on Sat 22nd Nov 2008 01:21 UTC
Michael
Member since:
2005-07-01

This is very nice, I'm sure for certain high-end, memory intensive supercomputing applications, but here on my desktop, the thing what's making all the heat is the CPU, not the RAM.

Whenever I read this stuff, I find it hard to get interested, knowing that I'm never really going to understand it and probably won't see anything come of it for the best part of a decade, if ever. It all sounds great, I just don't know what to do with this information.