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We propose to develop a new method of information storage to replace magnetic hard disk
drives and other instruments of secondary/backup data storage. The proposed method stores petabytes of
user-data in a sugar cube (1 cm3), and can read/write that information at hundreds of megabits/sec. Digital
information is recorded and stored in the form of a long macromolecule consisting of at least two bases, 𝐴
and 𝐵. (This would be similar to DNA strands constructed from the four nucleic acids 𝐺, 𝐶, 𝐴, 𝑇.) The
macromolecules initially enter the system as blank slates. A macromolecule with, say, 10,000 identical
bases in the form of 𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴. . . . 𝐴𝐴𝐴 may be used to record a kilobyte block of user-data (including
modulation and error-correction coding), although, in this blank state, it can only represent the null
sequence 00000....000. Suppose this blank string of 𝐴’s is dragged before an atomically-sharp needle of a
scanning tunneling microscope (STM). When electric pulses are applied to the needle in accordance with
the sequence of 0s and 1s of a 1 𝑘𝐵 block of user-data, selected 𝐴 molecules will be transformed into 𝐵
molecules (e.g., a fraction of 𝐴 will be broken off and discarded). The resulting string now encodes the
user-data in the form of 𝐴𝐴𝐵𝐴𝐵𝐵𝐴. . . 𝐵𝐴𝐵. The same STM needle can subsequently read the recorded
information, as 𝐴 and 𝐵 would produce different electric signals when the strand passes under the needle.
The macromolecule now represents a data block to be stored in a “parking lot” within the sugar cube, and
later brought to a read station on demand. Millions of parking spots and thousands of Read/Write stations
may be integrated within the micro-fabricated sugar cube, thus providing access to petabytes of user-data
in a scheme that benefits from the massive parallelism of thousands of Read/Write stations within the
same three-dimensionally micro-structured device.
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