Washington, April 29 : An Indian-American scientist has
developed a computer chip that can store an unprecedented amount
of data - enough to hold an entire library. The new chip stems
from a breakthrough in the use of nanodots, or nanoscale
magnets, and represents a significant advance in computer-memory
technology. "We have created magnetic nanodots that store one
bit of information on each nanodot, allowing us to store over
one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square
inch," says Jay Narayan, professor of Materials Science and
Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Narayan,
a product of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur,
conducted the study. The breakthrough is that these nanodots are
made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors
that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip.
These nanodots, which can be made uniformly as small as six
nanometres in diameter, are all precisely oriented in the same
way - allowing programmers to re