Micron Memory, a leader in worldwide supply of semiconductors, committed 15 billion dollars for the new construction of a manufacturing plant in Boise Idaho.

This new plant will be the first built in over 20 years inside the United States. In addition, it will become the only operational manufacturing facility within the United States. The 15 billion dollar investment by Micron will span the next ten years with investments inside of Boise and in other states as well.

This is the first of several planned US investments by Micron following the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act. This is the largest private investment ever made in Idaho. The new manufacturing fabrication facility will be a co-location with Micron’s Research and Development (R&D) center. Being this close to the company’s headquarters will improve operational efficiency, accelerate technology deployment, and shorten time to market.

The CHIPS and Science Act is a federal law in the United States that was passed by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 9, 2022. The act includes billions of dollars in new funding to boost domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing in the United States. The law is divided into three sections, each with its own short title:

• Division A is the CHIPS Act of 2022
• Division B is the Research and Development, Competition, and Innovation Act
• Division C is the Supreme Court Security Funding Act of 2022.

This endeavor will generate an estimated 17,000 new American jobs in which 2,000 will be Micron direct hires. To support Micron’s growing employee population, the company plans to open a world-class childcare facility operated by our local partners at the Treasure Valley Family YMCA across from Micron’s corporate headquarters. The center will provide STEM-based programming and easy access for parents to interact with their children during the day, as well as ease the transition for those, particularly mothers, returning to the workforce.

Boise State University, which is located less than ten minutes from Micron’s headquarters, is ranked 131 in Engineering. The press release from Micron did not mention investments or support to improve the engineering school’s rank over course of the 15 billion dollar investment. The #1 engineering school in the United States continues to be MIT (Massachusetts Institute in Technology).

IBM introduced the world’s first commercial storage system, the 305 RAMAC. in 1956. A magnetic disk was used to store data and was intended for a secondary storage system. RAMAC stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control and was designed for real-world needs of accounting in business. The first customers was the US Navy.

This physical size of the 305 was 6′ wide by 5′ deep (feet). Total storage capacity was 4.4MBs (megabytes). The weight for this storage system was just over one ton (source).

Today, (2022) we can see a 1TB (terabyte) of storage in a microSD card (TF Card) at the small size of 15mm x 11mm and the weight is under one gram.

The big selling point from IBM in 1956 was the ability for the 305 to store the equivalent of 64,000 punch cards on its magnetic disks. Punch cars are stiff pieces of paper which contain digital data represented by the presence [or absence] of holes in predefined positions on the card.

The IBM 350 disk system could store 5 million alphanumeric characters as six data bits, one parity bit, and one space bit, for a total of eight bits per character. It had fifty disks with a diameter of 24 inches. Under servo control, two independent access arms moved up and down to select a disk and in and out to select a recording track.

In comparison, today’s 1TB microSD card will hold about 6.5 million documents and said another way, 6.5 million documents bit in about 1,300 filing cabinets. The seek time to find a single file is about

In 1957, IBM would lease the RAMAC 305 for about $3,200 per month (roughly $33,000 in 2022 dollars). Over one thousand 305 systems were manufactured before production ceased in 1961.

Digital Storage in the Future

If we consider Moore’s Law which is storage capacity and technology in general will double every 18 months, we can calculate 43 cycles of Moore’s Law between today and 65 years into the future. Doing some advanced math, we figure the storage capacity of a microSD card, if still available, in 2087 will be 18,446,744,073,709,600,000,000,000 TBs of data.