Kumaraguru college of technology,Coimbator e.

TOPIC
COMBINED APPLICATION OF MEMS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY IN OBTAINING HIGH DATA STORAGE DENSITY Presentation by P.Diwakar(III-EIE) (diwasmile12@gmail.com) N.Sathyaraj(III-EIE) (sathyasmile91@gmail.com)

cOMBINED APPLICATION OF MEMS AND NANO TECHNOLOGY IN OBTAINING HIGH DATA STORAGE DENSITY

ABSTRACT
This paper explains the concept of obtaining high-density, non volatile and accessible memory using MEMS and nano-technology. A quantity of about trillion bits or more per square inch is possible by adopting this technique. Local probes can be used to read, write and deletes data in a thin polymer films. This thermo mechanical scanning-probe-based data-storage concept combines ultrahigh density, small form factor, and high data rate and lower cost per MB of data and have the potential to create a whole new storage technology capable of achieving a quantum decrease in entry cost, access time, volume, mass, power dissipation, failure rate, and shock sensitivity. These devices can integrate computation with storage, creating complete system-ona-chip. Thermo-mechanical storage process is achieved by the use of complex micro devices such as Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM) & Atomic Force Microscopes (AFM) which enable the manipulation of objects at the actual atomic dimensions. . The entire system can be built using Silicon lithography and Micromachining processes. While the Electronic sub-systems are fabricated using Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) techniques, the 3-D itinerant parts are etched through compatible Micro-machining sequences. This system can be further developed by using fuzzy-logic technique and made it to form a basic memory for quantum computer which is going to evolve within few decades.

INTRODUCTION

According to the proverb Necessity is the mother of Invention in the forthcoming centuries we are in need of high density data storage devices than the devices using micrometer technology in 20th and 21st century. The nanometer technique obtained from nanotechnology and the application of MEMS provide an excellent high density data storage device having capacity to store one trillion bit per square inch. As there is no clear cut way to modify micrometer scale to nanometer scale using magnetic storage technology we are using the same. Within a few years, however, magnetic storage technology will arrive at a stage of its exciting and successful evolution at which fundamental changes are likely to occur when current storage technology hits the well-known super-paramagnetic limit. To achieve a new era, we are searching for new technology by modifying current existing technology. But many of the techniques in use are not suitable for the forthcoming nanometer era. The modifications upon the existing techniques may be minor or major or replacement of whole technique. The consequence for storage is that any new technique with better areal storage density than todays magnetic recording should have long-term potential for further scaling, desirably down to the nanometer or even atomic scale. Our objective can be attained by using a device called nanometer sharp tip a boon from nanotechnology which provides very long term reliability. The current application of these devices is in atomic force microscope (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscope (STM) for imaging and structuring down to the atomic scale. The device is illustrated in fig. 1. The ultimate function of this device is local confinement of interaction, and it concentrates only on the particular job.

A nano-scale read/write tip

AFM tip with Cantilever support Fig. 1.

The cantilevered AFM tip, in particular plays a vital role in extreme high data storage density. The principle used in the device and the functions are discussed below

THE THERMO-MECHANICAL STORAGE CONCEPT

In recent years, AFM thermo-mechanical recording in polymer storage media has undergone extensive modifications, primarily with respect to the integration of sensors and heaters designed to enhance simplicity and to increase data rate and storage density. Using cantilevers with heaters, thermo-mechanical recording at 30 GB/ inch2 storage density and data rates of a few Mb/s for reading and 100 Kb/s for writing have been achieved. As shown in Fig 2, thermo-mechanical writing is a combination of applying a local force by the cantilevered AFM tip to the polymer layer and softening it by local heating. Initially, the heat transfer from the tip to the polymer through the small contact area is very poor, improving as the contact area increases. This means that the tip must be heated to a relatively high temperature (about 4008 oC) to initiate the melting process. Once melting has commenced, the tip is pressed into the polymer, which increases the heat transfer to the polymer, increases the volume of melted polymer, and hence increases the bit size.

Fig 2: Illustration of Thermo-mechanical storage

PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION

Fig 3: Illustration of MEMS based storage system

The system shown in Fig.3 is a highly parallel scanning-probe data-storage unit. Information is stored as sequences of indentations and no indentations that are written on nanometer-thick polymer films using an array of AFM cantilevers. Indentations and no indentations will be also referred to as logical marks. Each cantilever performs WRITE/READ/ERASE operations over an individual storage density on the order of (100 x 100) indentations / m 2. To write the bit 1" in the surface, the device sends a small electrical current into a tip, which heats it up enough to melt a small indentation in the surface. A "0" is represented by the unaltered surface. In this way, Data is formed by a thermo-mechanical process by applying local heating and force to the polymer through the tip. The device reads a bit by sensing the change in electrical potential in a tip caused by changes in temperature i.e., by scanning the resistance of the cantilever as it moves over the surface. A large number of cantilevers are employed and each AFM tip attached is operated independently to get high data rates and access speeds through Parallelism. Higher operational flexibility and data density is achieved by using parallel x/y scanning of the entire cantilever array chip over the flat storage medium. With this technique, 3040-nm-sized bit indentations of similar pitch size can be made by a single cantilever/tip in a thin (50-nm) PolyMethylMethacrylate (PMMA) layer, resulting in a data storage density of 400500 GB/in2.

THE READBACK CHANNEL STUDY

To read the written information, the heater cantilever originally used for writing is given the additional function of a thermal read back sensor by exploiting its temperature dependent resistance. In general, the resistance increases nonlinearly with heating power/temperature from room temperature to a peak value at 500 oC 700 oC. The peak temperature is determined by the doping concentration of the heater platform, which ranges from 1.10 to 2.10 cm. The principle of thermal sensing is based on the fact that the thermal conductance between the heater platform and the storage substrate changes according to the distance between them. The medium between the heater platform and the storage substrate, (in our case the air) transports heat from the

cantilever to the substrate. When the distance between cantilever and storage substrate is reduced as the tip moves into a bit indentation, the heat transport through the air becomes more efficient. As the value of the variable resistance depends on the temperature of the cantilever, the maximum value achieved by the resistance will be lower as the tip moves into an indentation. Therefore, during the read process, the cantilever resistance reaches different values depending on whether the tip moves into an indentation (bit 1) or over a region without an indentation (bit 0). The cantilever sensor (A basic schematic of which is shown in Fig 4), which transforms temperature into an electrical signal that carries information, is the electrical equivalent, to a first degree of approximation, of a variable resistance. A detection circuit must therefore sense a voltage that depends on the value of the cantilever resistance to decide whether a 1 or a 0 is written. Thus, one of the most critical issues in detecting the presence or absence of an indentation is the high resolution required to extract the signal that contains the information about the bit being 1 or 0.

Fig 4: A simple Logic Mark detection circuit.

CAPACITY AND DATA RATE CONSIDERATIONS

The ultimate locality provided by nanometer-sharp tips represents the pathway to the high areal density that will be needed in the foreseeable future. Todays storage capacity of a Millipede-based storage device can be further increased by applying modulation or constrained codes that impose restrictions on the number of consecutive 1s and 0s in the encoded data sequence. This class of codes is generally known as run-length-limited (RLL) {d, k}. The code parameters (d, k) are non-negative integers, whered indicates the minimum number of 0s between two 1s and k indicates the maximum number of zeros between two 1s. The

quantity {d+1} R (where R denotes the rate of the {d, k} code) is a direct measure of the increase in linear recording density. Clearly, the packing density can be made arbitrarily large by increasing d. On the other hand, large values of k lead to codes with very low rate, which implies high recording symbol rates, thus rendering these codes impractical for storage systems that are limited by the clock speed. The choice of d=1 and k>=6 guarantees the existence of a code with rate, R=2/3. This modulation coding reduces the bit distance by half while maintaining constant the pitch between 1s, thereby increasing the linear density by a factor of 4/3.

Fig 5 shows the user data rate as a function of the total number of cantilevers accessed simultaneously, for various symbol rates and a (d=1, k>=6) modulation coding scheme. For example, for a (32 x 32) cantilever array, a system designed to access a maximum of 256 cantilevers every s provides a user data rate of 34.1 Mb/s. alternatively, by resorting to the row/column multiplexing scheme with s a data rate of 8.5 Mb/s is achieved.

Fig 5: User data rate versus number of active cantilevers for the (d = 1, k >= 6) coding scheme.

IBMs Millipede
IBM's Zurich Research Labs, in collaboration with researchers at IBM's Almaden, atson and East Fishkill labs, are working on a MEMS data storage project code named Millipede, a memory system capable of holding 500 gigabits or more on a square inch of ultra-thin organic

polymer. Millipede works a bit like a punch card puncher. The Millipede read/write head is embedded with 1,000 AFM probes fabricated on a single silicon MEMS chip. These probes creep across the media surface to either pinch nanometer-sized indentations, or pits, such as those on a CD or DVD, that represent digital bits of information, or read back or erase previously pinched nano-scale pits. The Millipede advantage is not only more data in less space but also a lower cost-per-megabyte for consumers than flash. "We are aiming to replace flash," says Zurich Lab Millipede project manager Peter Vettiger, "But with a much higher capacity in the same shape and size as traditional flash memory media."

Fig 6: The Read/Write head of IBMs Millipede

CONCLUSION
This paper gives new idea of implementing MEMS based storage in to the memory hierarchy. The improved version of this technology forms a basic memory for quantum computers which are going to be invented in the forth coming years. At present, this technology significantly reduces the system power consumption and it poised to fill a large portion of performance gap of computers. Further improvement on this technology leads to the storage of Human Atomic Structure in to computers memory. According to the quote Knowledge is power we can make many impossible things, possible by using this combined knowledge of nanotechnology and MEMS.

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