IBM claims atom breakthrough

International Business Machines Corp. is developing a process that may pack more music on Apple Inc's iPod Nanos or make solar panels more efficient.

IBM scientists are unveiling today a technique for observing atomic reactions in real-time. It may help manufacturers make smaller devices with greater memory, Spike Narayan, an IBM researcher, said in a phone interview.

"It's easy to make things on a small scale, but to understand how things behave going down to the smaller scale, that's really what's needed," said Narayan, who manages science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

IBM, the world's largest computer-services provider, invested about $6 billion, or about 6 percent of its sales, in research projects last year. The company is aiming to design more efficient methods to process and store information as customers demand more computing power.

The technique may enable manufacturers to make hard-drives that hold 1,000 times more data than now, said Rob Enderle, a principal analyst at Enderle Group. One version of the iPhone 4, Apple's newest model with features including video calls, Web surfing and a music player, has a capacity of 32 gigabytes.

"Think of iPhones that, instead of having gigabytes, have terabytes -- that's what this could mean," Enderle said. One terabyte is equivalent to about 1,000 gigabytes. "It allows them to put vastly more data in a vastly smaller space," the San Jose-based analyst said.

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