Recent Progress on Probe-Based Storage Devices

Prosperity of information technology triggers a tremendous amount of digital data that needs to be stored by storage memories with ultra-high capacity. Although probe-based memory has exhibited its superb storage merits, its developments to date, however, remain slow due to several physical limits. In order to overcome its drawbacks, and to further advance probe storage technologies, a comprehensive review regarding the current status and future prospect of probe-based memories become of importance. In this paper, we first presented the physical principles of various reported probe-based memories and their respective advantages/disadvantages, as well as their current status. Subsequently, up-to-date progress made on these probe memories and some novel probe memories concepts is proposed. The prospect of a probe-based memory device is finally predicted.