Seagate's Record: 421 Gbits/sq.in.

2006 is the 50th anniversary year of the hard disk drive. Seagate celebrated that with the announcement of a new world record.

Seagate could pack 421 Gigabits per square inch onto magnetic media, dramatically increasing storage capacities for magnetic drives. Using perpendicular recording technology, the company demonstrated this new storage feat using production equipment that is currently available.

This new technology is expected to substantially improve drive capacity. The 1-and 1.8-inch consumer electronics drives could be blown out to 40GB and 275GB, 500GB for 2.5-inch notebook drives, and nearly 2.5TB for 3.5-inch desktop and enterprise class drives. Seagate says that at 2.5TB, a hard drive would be capable of storing 41,650 hours of music, 800,000 digital photographs, 4,000 hours of digital video or 1,250 video games. It anticipates that solutions at these density levels could begin to emerge in 2009.

The areal density of 421 Gbpsi was demonstrated using 10 E-3 off-track bit error rate criteria with 5 per cent squeeze and meeting a 10 per cent off-track capability at a data rate of 735 megabits per second. The track density was 275,000 tracks per inch, and the linear density was 1.53 million bits per inch for a bit aspect ratio of 5.6. The demonstration was conducted using a product channel, perpendicular head and thermally stable media created with current production equipment.

Seagate says using new recording technology, its researchers have estimated that magnetic recording capacities should reach or exceed 50 terabits per square inch. So, the current record may not have to stand for long ....

Samsung's 40nm Flash Memory

Hwang Chang-gyu

Samsung President Hwang Chang-gyu has a law: The density of the top-of-the-line flash memory chips will double every 12 months [Remember the famous Moore's Law, which says the processing power of the state-of-the-art chips will double every 18 months].

Under the stewardship of Hwang, who took the reins of Samsung's semiconductor business in 2000, the company has been realizing the projection of its boss for the last 6 years: Samsung doubled the density of the world's top-line flash memory from 256Mb in 1999, to 512Mb in 2000, 1Gb in 2001, 2Gb in 2002, 4Gb in 2003, 8Gb in 2004, 16Gb in 2005 and 32Gb this year. The new chips could be combined to make a data-storage card of up to 64 gigabytes compared with the one, two and four gigabytes of capacity common to today's storage cards.

Yesterday at its annual press conference in Seoul, Hwang unveiled a world's first 40nm, 32Gb NAND flash memory chip. High-precision machines of Samsung Electronics can now etch circuits with 40-nanometer technology, roughly one-3,000th the thickness of a human hair, on the face of silicon wafers. The manufacturing process employed a new technology, called charge trap flash (CTF), to enhance the durability of the tiny chips.

Flash memory, especially NAND-type one, has become the mainstream data storage device in almost all digital cameras, MP3 players and multimedia cell phones thanks to its characteristics of fast-read access time and solid-state shock resistance and their ability to store data even when power is switched off. NAND flash is even entering the PC computing environment led by Samsung, which came up with a pair of NAND flash-empowered laptops in June. Up until now, memory devices for computers have been the main market of hard disk drives, and memory chips have not been in competition due to their relatively small storage capacity.

Samsung will roll out the 40nm flash memories sometime in 2008. It projects that the CTF-based NAND will be refined down to 20nm within a few years.

Related News: Samsung also unveiled a new type of memory chip that it said will allow digital devices to work faster by saving new data more quickly. The phase-change random access memory, or PRAM, is nonvolatile, meaning it will retain data even when an electronic device is turned off, and is about 30 times faster than conventional flash memory, Samsung said. The company showed off a 512-megabit prototype at a press conference. It is expected to be available in 2008.

Currently, two types of nonvolatile flash memory chips — NOR and NAND — are widely used in electronic devices. NOR chips are suitable for running software directly, but are slower and more expensive to manufacture. NAND chips are easier to make in larger capacities but are more suitable for big data files, such as MP3 music. On the other hand, the memory storage device in personal computers use DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, chips.

IBM to build Fastest Supercomputer

BlueGene/L [Photo courtsey: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)]

International Business Machines late Wednesday said it has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to design and build a next-generation supercomputer that could achieve a speed of up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop. The DOE confirmed that Congress has provided $35 million in fiscal 2006 for the project.

The machine, codenamed "Roadrunner", could be four times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM [Read our report on Top500 supercomputers].

The DOE added that "Roadrunner" could be used for the NNSA's stockpile stewardship program, which helps ensure that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is safe and reliable without the resumption of underground nuclear testing.

The new computer is a "hybrid" design, using both conventional supercomputer processors and the new "cell" chip designed for Sony's PlayStation 3. The machine is to be built entirely from commercially available hardware and based on the Red Hat Linux Version 4.3 operating system. IBM System x 3755 systems based on AMD Opteron technology will be deployed in conjunction with IBM BladeCenter H systems with Cell technology. IBM will begin shipping the new supercomputer to the DOE facility at Los Alamos later this year, with completion of the installation and acceptance anticipated in 2008. It will cover 12,000 square feet (1,100 square metres) of floor space there.