3.8 Bucky Crystal Memory Chips

When finely dispersed diamond powder (4-6 nanometers) is treated with thermal annealing under certain conditions (heated in graphite crucible in argon to 1800 degrees C for 1 hour) oblong multiwall carbon structures appear.

It can move around inside each other, like having a C60 trapped in a C480. It turns out that there are two potential energy minima corresponding to lying at the ends, and if the buckyball would be given a charge by sitting a ion inside of it, it can be shuttled by an applied electric field. It turns out that the buckyball neatly shuttles to the right end, and gently bounces to rest (the energy is dissipated as 10 Kelvin thermal vibrations in the C480, far too little energy to disrupt the molecule); it takes around 10 picoseconds. A high-density memory board with aligned buckyshuttles in a hexagonal lattice and addressing wires above and below, not unlike a old ferrite core memory. The memory is nonvolatile at room temperature. Switching and access can at least be 100 Gbyte/s, and ideally 10 THz.

Bucky Memory chips are inherently ruggedized, owing to their molecular structure being so similar to diamond. This allows the chip to be handled without protective gloves. Many portable data-handling devices such as tricorders, PADDs, and optical chip readers are being configured to read and write to these memory crystals.