One of the panels at Westercon was about current applications of nanotechnology.
Turns out that any multi-gig disk uses nanotech, if you use the definition of 'any part or structure created with a dimension in the nanometers' - the thin-film coatings that are used to lay down drive surface and to make the read-heads are about 5 nanos thick, and they've managed to lay down an atom-thick layer in some of their upcoming devices. There's also a replacement for flash memory, that functions more like old-fashioned core memory but which uses the nano-film process to lay down read lines, which could be providing gigabyte memory modules in the same form-factor as current DIMMs, but using about a third the power. That's been announced, and so may be appearing within 2-3 years.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-19 11:09 am (UTC)Turns out that any multi-gig disk uses nanotech, if you use the definition of 'any part or structure created with a dimension in the nanometers' - the thin-film coatings that are used to lay down drive surface and to make the read-heads are about 5 nanos thick, and they've managed to lay down an atom-thick layer in some of their upcoming devices.
There's also a replacement for flash memory, that functions more like old-fashioned core memory but which uses the nano-film process to lay down read lines, which could be providing gigabyte memory modules in the same form-factor as current DIMMs, but using about a third the power. That's been announced, and so may be appearing within 2-3 years.