Storage for the Millennium
If people can read this story a millennium from now, they may have Tadahiro Kuroda to thank. Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory chip sealed in silicon that he says can store data for 1,000 years.
Kuroda’s Rosetta stone will be a stack of four thin wafers, each one 15 inches in diameter and roughly 12-thousandths of an inch thick, embedded with 1,100 tiny chips. Together, says Kuroda, the four wafers will have 312 gigabytes of memory, the equivalent of 480 standard cds. The wafer stack is sealed in silicon dioxide, which keeps the humidity below 2%, preventing corrosion.
Kuroda's method: Instead of moving data as electrons through wires, as occurs in standard semiconductors, Kuroda’s sealed stack of wafers allows information to be beamed wirelessly on radio waves. This is a variation on radio-frequency identification technology, used in everything from scannable passports to inventory tracking.
'Rosetta stone' offers digital lifeline
The Rosetta Stone is built on silicon wafers used in the chip industry
Hard drives are susceptible to magnetic fields
Tadahiro Kuroda
clipped from nextbigfuture.com
clipped from news.bbc.co.uk
