CDs 'could be history in five years'

interesting article from Ananova bq. Compact discs could be history within five years, superseded by a new generation of fingertip-sized memory tabs with no moving parts. bq. Scientists say each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte of information - equivalent to 1,000 high quality images - in one cubic centimetre of space. bq. Experts have developed the technology by melding together organic and inorganic materials in a unique way. bq. They say it could be used to produce a single-use memory card that permanently stores data and is faster and easier to operate than a CD. They go on: bq. A report in the journal Nature described how the researchers identified a new property of a polymer called PEDOT. bq. PEDOT, which is clear and conducts electricity, has been used for years as an anti-static coating on photographic film. Researchers looked at ways of using PEDOT to store digital information. In the new memory card, data in the form of ones and zeroes would be represented by polymer pixels. A bit more detail: PEDOT is PolyEthyleneDi*OxyThiophene and has been around for a while. * the Di is actually a Thi but the original compound was Di and the 'nym stuck... Water based, fairly (hell yeah at 1.5pH) acidic. Interesting uses are cropping up all over - it's also used for LEP displays and organic semiconductors. Limited temperature range so far so I would not leave the "music stick" on the dashboard of my car during summer but still... UPDATE: Science Blog has some more information bq. From Princeton University: New memory device could offer smaller, simpler way to archive data Discovery of new property in commonly used plastic leads to invention bq. The research was done in Forrest's lab by former postdoctoral researcher Sven M�ller, who is now at HP in Corvallis, Ore. Craig Perlov, Warren Jackson and Carl Taussig, scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., are also co-authors of the Nature paper. bq. M�ller made the basic discovery behind the device by experimenting with polymer material called PEDOT, which is clear and conducts electricity. It has been used for years as an antistatic coating on photographic film, and more recently as an electrical contact on video displays that require light to pass through the circuitry. M�ller found that PEDOT conducts electricity at low voltages, but permanently loses its conductivity when exposed to higher voltages (and thus higher currents), making it act like a fuse or circuit breaker. bq. This finding led the researchers to use PEDOT as a way of storing digital information. Digital images and all computerized data are stored as numbers that are written as long strings of ones and zeroes. A PEDOT-based memory device would have a grid of circuits in which all the connections contain a PEDOT fuse. A high voltage could be applied to any of the contact points, blowing that particular fuse and leaving a mix of working and non-working circuits. These open or closed connections would represent zeros and ones and would become permanently encoded in the device. A blown fuse would block current and be read as a zero, while an unblown one would let current pass and act as a one. bq. This grid of memory circuits could be made so small that, based on the test junctions the researchers made, 1 million bits of information could fit in a square millimeter of paper-thin material. If formed as a block, the device could store more than one gigabyte of information, or about 1,000 high-quality images, in one cubic centimeter, which is about the size of a fingertip. Lots more work to be done but this is really cool!