Crystal ball gazing
Scottish boffins believe that they hold the key to
growing supercomputers out of crystals. They believe that the technology could end up creating
computers with massive storage capacity.
Boffins at the University of Edinburgh used low-powered
lasers to make salt crystals in gel. The crystals could be used as storage devices for desktop
computers capable of holding a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar
cube.
They admit that it will take a while before these
crystals can be used in practical applications such as optical storage, but Dr
Andy Alexander said that the technology was getting there. Compared with the flat two-dimensional surface of a CD,
three-dimensional optical data storage uses many more layers, in which tiny
crystals could act as storage points.