15-07-2011, 11:54 AM
While magnetic and semiconductor based information storage devices have been in use since the middle 1950's, today's computers and volumes of information require increasingly more efficient and faster methods of storing data. While the speed of integrated circuit random access memory (RAM) has increased steadily over the past ten to fifteen years, the limits of these systems are rapidly approaching. In response to the rapidly changing face of computing and demand for physically smaller, greater capacity, bandwidth, a number of alternative methods to integrated circuit information storage have surfaced recently. Among the most promising is the protein-based optical memory storage. This paper focuses mainly on protein-based optical memory storage using the photosensitive protein bacteriorhodopsin with the two-photon method of exciting the molecules. Bacteriorhodopsin is a light-harvesting protein from bacteria that live in salt marshes that has shown some promise as a feasible optical data storage. The use of this hybrid technology in which the molecules and semiconductors combine and share the duty will appreciably improve the speed and reduce the size of the computers.