Leibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. This blog is about the disruptive technologies that either have or will win over electronic engineers, some that won't, and why. Please feel free to link to these blog entries! Written by Steve Leibson, a marketing consultant specializing in lead generation and content creation for high-tech companies, former VP of Content for Reed Business, and former Editor in Chief of EDN. See my consulting Web site at www.sleibson.com and my history site at www.hp9825.com. You can email me at steven.leibson followed by the magic email symbol @ followed by att.net.
Jul 3 2009 8:03AM | Permalink |Comments (0) |
I’ve written about graphene before. It looks like the single-atom-thick carbon sheets may well be the semiconductor of choice in the future. Now comes news that it’s theoretically possible to trap cobalt dimers (pairs of cobalt atoms) vertically within a hexagonal carbon ring in the graphene and that trapped dimer will exhibit ferromagnetic characteristics. In other words, the cobalt dimer serves as a 2-atom magnetic memory bit contained within a 6-atom framework.
Currently, there are experimental cobalt ferromagnetic memories based on 8nm cobalt nanoparticles (clumps of about 50,000 cobalt atoms), but a cobalt dimer in a graphene hex ring measures much less than 1 nm. You can get the details from Technology Review and from this article from the Foresight Institute. Note, this information is based on the results of theoretical research. Cobalt-dimer-based non-volatile memory is not coming to Fry’s or to your PC in the immediate future.
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