A University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher has made a discovery which could dramatically increase electronic storage capacity. The work could break a computer memory barrier dictated by particle size and stability.
UAF Geophysical Institute professor Gunther Kletetschka’s work is hard to wrap your mind around, because it involves nano, or the billionth of meter, size particles used in computer chips. Kletetschka and colleagues have developed a technique that gets around current size limitations. It allows control of magnetization of particles within tiny cylinders of carbon or nanotubes, a technology Klatetschka says has the potential to increase data storage tenfold.
“Let’s say you have now a regular chip, and that chip has two gigabytes of memory,” Kletetschka said. “And now if you replace this two gigabytes by this invention, you get 20 gigabytes.”
Kletetschka says the potential is far greater if the organic graphene nanotubes, can be employed to interpret DNA.
”If you are passing the DNA through the graphene by measuring the electronic properties of the graphene material, you can basically do sequencing,” Kletetschka said. “Does it make sense?”
Maybe not in a short radio story, but Kletetschka assures the use of DNA for data storage would offer a shattering capacity leap.
”If you stored memory in the DNA, it would be many more orders of magnitude of increase of the memory space,” Kletetschka said.
Kletetschka emphasizes that the work is still in an early stage. He and collaborators in Japan, and the Czech Republic recently published their research in the journal: Nature Science Reports.
Dan Bross is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
