Shane's Blog

IBM Research is detailing its quest to find the smallest number of atoms required to store a bit, the fundamental unit of digital data. The answer is just 12, IBM says — a pretty remarkable stat considering that memory in today’s PCs has around a million atoms per bit (by our rough calculations, that’s nearly 69 quadrillion atoms for an 8GB machine). By aligning the atoms in two offset rows of six with alternating magnetic orientation, IBM figured out that it could isolate the bit so that it wouldn’t magnetically interfere with the bits around it.