It came from the Lab -- Caltech and UCLA researchers announced the densest memory circuit ever, one that's at least 100 times denser than current standard memory circuits. And it's as small as a human white blood cell. That's about 100 billion bits per square centimeter.
The circuit has 160,000 bits of capacity (previous generations of molecular circuits were demonstrated at 64 bits). Chemistry professor James Heath (Caltech) and J. Fraser Stoddart (UCLA) noted that the semiconductor industry's own projections show they it is only a few years from running out of steam in the manufacturing approaches used to create smaller and smaller circuits, so according to them: "What we did is leapfrogged that and developed another approach."
The 160,000 memory bits are arranged like a large tic-tac-toe board with 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires and a layer of molecular switches in between. Each bit is just 15nm wide, compared with the most dense memory devices currently available that measure 140nm. --ks