Son of Millipede

IBM has been playing with this technology for awhile, hoping to license the final process. Here’s a company that looks ready to field their own product in a couple years. The trick in this game is to provide a mechanical device that does not wear out with repeated use, and the article indicates (though it doesn’t say how) this company has addressed the problem of worn out tips.

A storage technology that breaks Moore’s Law

Lai said that in principle, Nanochip could develop the ability to move the probe a single atom at a time. The company said its current generation of probes has a radius smaller than 25nm, but it projects that eventually the probes could be shrunk to two or three nanometers apiece. That scale, said Knight will enable development in 10 to 12 years of a memory chip greater than 1TB. For a first generation, anticipated in 2010, Knight says he expects a small number of chips to be in excess of 100GB, but a more realistic number is “tens of gigabytes” per integrated circuit, a capacity comparable to the current generation of flash devices.