Plastic Bounces Back
If such an information-saturated environment ever comes to fruition, the implications for solution providers are clear: The more information there is, the greater the demands on generating, storing, processing and transporting the data.
There are multiple research efforts achieving the successes that may fulfill this vision by creating inexpensive alternatives to semiconductor memory. Complex semiconductors such as memory chips continue to plummet in price thanks to volume and technical advances, but their manufacturing process and cost of fabrication place limits on how cheap they can ever be.
If by using new materials the price of memory can be driven to insignificant levels, then there is little reason not to include it in any product that could garner a competitive advantage from it. Would a consumer be more likely to buy a can of beans for a few cents more if its label is embedded with hundreds of binary bean-based recipes?
Many researches are looking for,and finding,cost-effective alternatives to standard semiconductor components and manufacturing techniques. One technology developed by researchers at Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard Labs is based on, of all materials, plastic. The plastic is bound to a foil substrate to create a write-once memory; no clean rooms or lithography is needed.
Similar to old-fashioned EPROMS, fusible links in the plastic can be blown by passing a current through them during the writing or programming phase. A lower current can detect which links were blown as part of the read phase. The technology can replace pre-programmed memory in consumer devices and may provide a cheap, disposable, onetime-use alternative to flash memory or CD-Rs.