IBM Publishes Nanotech Breakthroughs

The company's latest research could eventually lead to processors and storage a thousand times smaller than modern technology allows.

If Apple’s latest 80GB iPods impress you, just imagine fitting 125,000GB in the same device. The journal Science published nanotech research from IBM on Friday that could eventually make this kind of storage possible. While still rudimentary, IBM’s technology may eventually lead to data storage on the atomic level, and processors so small they would rival specks of dust.

IBM’s first insight regards a property called magnetic anisotropy, which determines an atom’s ability to store data. In the past, scientists hadn’t been able to measure the property on an atomic level, but IBM researchers used a special scanning tunneling microscope to arrange individual iron atoms on a copper surface. When they finished, they were able to read the strength and direction of the atom’s magnetic anisotropy – information that could eventually be harnessed to store data.

The company’s second breakthrough allowed researchers to build switches out of individual molecules. While this had been accomplished in the past, the molecules shifted shape afterward, rendering them useless for building logic gates. By using two hydrogen molecules and a naphthalocyanine organic molecule, they were able to build the same kind of on/off switches used in silicon computer chips.

IBM’s magnetic anisotropy research was carried out in San Jose, Calif. While the single-molecule gates were developed in Zurich, Switzerland.