NANO TECHNOLOGY:

NANO TECHNOLOGY:"'Companies such as AT&T, Ford, IBM, RCA and Westinghouse Electric made serious efforts to develop non-volatile RAMs in the 1950s, but couldn't achieve commercial use,' said Argonne researcher Orlando Auciello. 'Back then, NVRAMs were based on expensive ferroelectric single crystals, which required substantial voltage to switch their polarity. This, and cross talk inherent in the then recently devised row matrix address concept, made them impractical.

'Working on the nanoscale changes this,' said Auciello. 'It means higher density memories with faster speeds and megabyte (the amount of memory needed to store one million characters of information) - or even gigabyte (one billion bytes) - capacity. It's not clear how soon such capacity will be available, but competition is heavy, stakes are high, and some companies claim they will have the first fruits of this research within two years.'"