A boffin at North Carolina State University has developed a computer chip that can store an entire library’s worth of information on a single chip. The new chip uses nanodots, or nanoscale magnets, which can store more than a billion pages of data on an inch square bit of material.

Dr. Jay Narayan, the John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State and author of the research said that the nanodots are made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip. These nanodots, which can be made uniformly and be six nm in diameter. Since they are oriented in the same way - allowing programmers to reliably read and write data to the chips.

They appear to be cheap to make, but need the right kind of magnetic packaging so that users can interact with them.