John C. Dvorak

If you thought that the Microdrive from IBM was cool, you'll be more impressed if IBM can get its new Nanodrive out of the lab. Developed at IBM's Almaden Research facility, and announced today, the new drive relies on what is termed a natural bio-actuator—in this case, an insect antenna—to actually control the head position of a nanoscale hard drive.

The concept was developed by visiting IBM fellow, Latot Esnesnon, known by his colleagues as the Einstein of Lithuania. He was trained at Manchester and holds a professorship at Berkeley, although he spends most of his time at IBM's TJ Watson Research center working with insects, trying to find one that could be used for simple logic and genetically bred to make a biological computer. In the course of his investigations, he stumbled on what IBM calls the Esnesnon Effect—the movement by a precise distance of a specific insect antenna when a square wave impulse is sent into the insect's body.

IBM has since developed a prototype nanoGMR head using ruthenium that is literally glued to the end of the antenna. The data itself will transmit across the outer layer of the antenna which is coated with gold plate approximately one atom thick. The pulse-code-modulated square wave that makes the antenna move is fed into a leg to deliver the data to the GMR head. The small hard disk itself can hold only 1KB of data, but IBM expects that eventually to evolve to 100 megabytes, then a gigabyte.

IBM has been trying to develop organic technologies for the past 20 years. Commercializing the insect actuator would save millions of dollars according to the company, given that the parts could be bred and would mass produce themselves. In fact, do a quick Web search for "insect actuator" and you'll discover that Fujitsu actually developed a similar technology years before IBM. The Japanese abandoned the idea, however, apparently because of insect--desiccation issues that caused alignment problems. Fujitsu believes the problem cannot be fixed. But the Esnesnon effect itself seems to be maintained even when the bug is completely dried up. Insect-actuated Nanodrive prototype

IBM says it can beat the alignment problem by using just the insect head instead of the whole body. Drying of the insect body seems to cause the alignment shift. The head is harder, and the desiccating effect is negligible. Unfortunately, the current IBM design (see picture) requires that the square wave be sent into the body of the insect by way of a leg that is soldered onto the chip substrate. Right now, there is no other way of getting the square wave into the insect head.

And according to one skeptic at Seagate, there's the problem of oozing, especially when the head is cut from the insect body, which causes bug juice to flow over the silicon and short it out.

Then we have the government. Apparently the FDA will have something to say about all this, and this seems to be the problem that Fujitsu ran into and may be why Fujitsu really stopped this research. Although incredible, the way the food and drug laws are written, there is a limit on the amount of insect parts that can be found in processed food. Apparently the FDA definition of "process" can be loosely interpreted to mean the process technology to make chips. Based on this loophole, the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco—laughable as this may sound—allowed an odd lawsuit against Intel to be heard. The action was brought by a group of disgruntled developers who used the loophole to sue over "bugs" in Intel firmware. The suit was eventually thrown out when no real insect parts could be cited. But since the case was heard in the first place, it opened the door for potential action against IBM.

IBM thinks it can get the law modified while the product is in development, and the company says it will just pay the fines in the meantime. But according to one industry rumor, the government is going to ask for an injunction against any further testing because, as one source put it, "until this gets straightened out...the law is the law."

I'm sure we'll see how this turns out by next April 1.

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