Overview of Probe-based Storage Technologies.

Lei Wang,Jing Wen,Ci Hui Yang,Yuan Xiu Peng,Si Di Gong

doi:10.1186/s11671-016-1556-9

Abstract

The current world is in the age of big data where the total amount of global digital data is growing up at an incredible rate. This indeed necessitates a drastic enhancement on the capacity of conventional data storage devices that are, however, suffering from their respective physical drawbacks. Under this circumstance, it is essential to aggressively explore and develop alternative promising mass storage devices, leading to the presence of probe-based storage devices. In this paper, the physical principles and the current status of several different probe storage devices, including thermo-mechanical probe memory, magnetic probe memory, ferroelectric probe memory, and phase-change probe memory, are reviewed in details, as well as their respective merits and weakness. This paper provides an overview of the emerging probe memories potentially for next generation storage device so as to motivate the exploration of more innovative technologies to push forward the development of the probe storage devices.

Highlights

Today, the prosperity of social networks such as Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook, in conjunction with the digitalization of the daily service of worldwide citizens, has triggered a radical increase on the total amount of global digital data
Due to the low field emanated from the magnetic tip, the crystalline anisotropy of the storage medium for magnetic probe memory needs to remain low to ensure the successful magnetization reversal while at the expense of the resulting recording density
In terms of phase-change probe memory, during the recording process, a write current is injected to phase-change media through the conductive probe tip to either heat the media to crystalline temperature for crystallization, or to the melting temperature followed by a rapid cooling to generate amorphization

Summary

Introduction

The prosperity of social networks such as Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook, in conjunction with the digitalization of the daily service of worldwide citizens, has triggered a radical increase on the total amount of global digital data. The ability to simultaneously record and read bits using tip arrays obviously endows thermo-mechanical probe memory with some advantageous traits such as ultra-high recording density and high data/write speed when in comparison with conventional data storage devices [13,14,15,16].

Results

Conclusion