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Neat... Reminds me just a little bit of an episode of Eureka.

(Season 3, episode 3, "Best in Faux", for the two people who might actually be interested.)

Here's their thought process: "Oh, I have an idea. Let's expand storage in phase-change memory by using DIAMONDS. It's not like their expensive or anything..." I mean really, although man is what has put the value on diamonds, it isn't helping with making the product less expensive for the eventual rollout.

Interesting, using the hardness of diamonds to create compression and slow change on a molecular level. Diamonds are also used as tips to pressure-sensitive probes that can map out a microscopic image... like electron microscopes, it's an alternative way to look at the absolutely tiny instead of light and optics.

The thing about this article, though, is it seems like three sources or three repeats of the info told in different ways. And doesn't the article quote that this diamond method is "rewritable 100,000 times" while the best NAND chips can "only be rewritten 100,000 times" ? I'm confused, because it says inbetween these lines that IBM can use this tech to make memory that can be written to about 5 million cycles. I don't mean to be critical, but beyond the vague "we got something here that is in development, and should be better than what we have today" message, it's hard to pull out useful details; this article could use a little editing. But thanks for finding the topic!

FlynnLandau, on 05 May 2012 - 08:54 PM, said:

Industrial grade diamonds are actually not that expensive. Only the jewel-grade stones are particularly expensive.