faster

  1. Engineers develop material that could speed telecommunications

    In a study published July 10 on Nature Photonics’s website, Serdar Kocaman, an electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate, and Chee Wei Wong, associate professor of mechanical engineering, demonstrated how an optical nanostructure can be built that controls the way light bounces off it. When light travels, it bends—in technical terms, it disperses and incurs “phase,” an oscillating curve that leaves a trail of information behind it. Those oscillations show an object’s properties, such as shape and size, which can identify it. However, light hits Kocaman’s and Wong’s specially engineered material without leaving a trace. Every natural known material has a positive refractive index: when light hits it, the light bends or refracts. The researchers engineered a structure in which they etched tiny holes, creating a material known as a “photonic crystal” which behaves as though it has zero index – light can travel with an ultrafast

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  2. IBM develops 'instantaneous' memory, 100x faster than flash

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    IBM develops 'instantaneous' memory, 100x faster than flash!


    You've got to hand it to IBM's engineers. They drag themselves into work after their company's 100th birthday party, pop a few Alka-Seltzers and then promptly announce yet another seismic invention. This time it's a new kind of phase change memory (PCM) that reads and writes 100 times faster than flash, stays reliable for millions of write-cycles (as opposed to just thousands with flash), and is cheap enough to be used in anything from enterprise-level servers all the way down to mobile phones. PCM is based on a special alloy that can be nudged into different physical states, or phases, by controlled bursts of electricity. In the past, the technology suffered from the tendency of one of the states to relax and increase its electrical resistance over time, leading to read errors. Another limitation was that each alloy cell could only store a single bit of data. But IBM employees burn through problems like these
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