New Nanomaterial May Store 1TB on a Chip

A new material that could enable a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text has been created by engineers at North Carolina State University engineers. The team used selective doping, a process in which an impurity is added to a material that changes its properties. The discovery could also help raise engine fuel economy and reduce heat produced by semiconductors.

The engineers worked at the nanometer level (a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers) to add the metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers, a 90 percent size reduction compared to todays techniques and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity. Information storage is one area where advances could be applied. By introducing metallic properties into ceramics, Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data, the lead researcher said.

Engineers could also develop ceramic engines that withstand double the temperatures of current engines and get fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon. The discovery also contributes to the emergent field of spintronics, the manipulation of energy produced by the spinning of electrons.

According to the paper The Synthesis and Magnetic Properties of a Nanostructured Ni-MGO System By: J. Narayan, Sudhakar Nori, S. Ramachandran, and J.T. Prater, NC State University Published in June 2009 in JOM (Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society):

"In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Blochs T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions".