Korean-U.S. Team in Computer Storage Breakthrough

A Korean-U.S. research team has developed technology that could increase computer storage capacity more than 10,000 times, in theory allowing 12,500 films to be stored on a single DVD.
The team of Park Soo-jin (35), a professor of nano-biochemical engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, and Thomas Russell, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, in a paper published in the Thursday issue of Science said by adopting a self-assembly method by which molecules take certain forms by themselves, they succeeded in increasing the capacity of storage media more than 10,000 times.

Storage media have micro grooves, or bits, the basic unit in information science. The more particles there are in each bit, the more information the device can carry, and the denser the grooves are, the more information can be stored.

The team says it succeeded in making the grooves denser by narrowing the space between them to 7nm (1nm = 1 billionth of a meter) using a self-assembly method by which atoms arrange themselves in grooves. But to be of practical use, a "head" or device that can read the minuscule bits is needed.

(englishnews@chosun.com )