Recent advances in information storage using magnetic recording have been a key to producing today's faster and smaller computers ("The Big, Bad Bit Stuffers of IBM," TR July/August 1998). But squeezing more and more data onto magnetic materials is getting tougher, threatening to slow progress to a crawl. To tackle the problem, scientists at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory have built a micromechanical device, called Millipede, that uses a thousand tiny tips to rapidly "feel" data bits on a nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) scale.

"In a sense," says IBM researcher Gerd Binnig, "it's old-fashioned. It works very similarly to a record player that has an arm and a needle." But, Binnig adds, the micromechanical device could also represent the future of information storage. Because of its potential ability to "read" and "write" data on a nanometer scale, it could store up to 500 billion bits (gigabits) per square inch (the record for magnetic storage is 11 gigabits per square inch). That could lead to hard disks with storage capacity of several trillion bits (terabits). It could also mean small products, such as watches and mobile phones, that have immense storage capacity.