Category Technology/Electronics

The total amount of data generated worldwide is expected to reach 175 zettabytes (1 ZB equals 1 billion terabytes) by 2025. If 175 ZB were stored on Blu-ray disks, the stack would be 23 times the distance to the moon. There is an urgent need to develop storage technologies that can accommodate this enormous amount of data.

The demand to store ever-increasing volumes of information has resulted in the widespread implementation of data centers for Big Data. These centers consume massive amounts of energy (about 3% of global electricity supply) and rely on magnetization-based harddisk drives with limited storage capacity (up to 2 TB per disk) and lifespan (three to five years)...

Responding to artificial intelligence’s exploding demands on computer networks, Princeton University researchers in recent years have radically increased the speed and slashed the energy use of specialized AI systems. Now, the researchers have moved their innovation closer to 0003Verma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton and a leader of the research team. “The hope is that designers can keep using the same software system — and just have it work ten times faster or more efficiently.”

New storage and information technology requires new higher performance materials. One of these materials is yttrium iron garnet, which has special magnetic properties. Thanks to a new process, it can now be transferred to any material. Developed by physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the method could advance the production of smaller, faster and more energy-efficient components for data storage and information processing. The physicists have published their results in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Magnetic materials play a major role in the development of new storage and information technologies...

Cornell University scientists have identified a new contender when it comes to quantum materials for computing and low-temperature electronics.

Using nitride-based materials, the researchers created a material structure that simultaneously exhibits superconductivity — in which electrical resistance vanishes completely — and the quantum Hall effect, which produces resistance with extreme precision when a magnetic field is applied.

“This is a beautiful marriage of the two things we know, at the microscale, that give electrons the most startling quantum proper...