IBM Develops Racetrack, New Class of Memory
A new solid-state memory technology dubbed “racetrack” that offers 100 times the storage in the same space available on current hard disk drives and solid-state drives (SSDs) could be commercially available within a decade, according to Dr. Stuart Parkin and colleagues at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose.
In racetrack memory, information is stored in the domain walls, or boundaries, between magnetic regions on a wire. The domain walls are then shuttled up or down the wire via electrical pulses toward another component that can interpret whether the domain wall represents a “1″ or a “0.”
Using spintronics–the storage of bits generated by the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge–a proof-of-concept shift register was recently demonstrated by IBM. The prototype encodes bits into the magnetic domain walls along the length of a silicon nanowire, or racetrack. IBM uses “massless motion” to move the magnetic domain walls along the nanowire for the storage and retrieval of information.
Racetrack chips, potentially, could additionally last far longer because they have no moving parts, unlike hard drives, and won’t get progressively worn out by successive read-erase cycles like flash memory. Flash chips typically last 100,000 read-write cycles before errors can become a problematic possibility.
“Racetrack is essentially the third turn of the crank of this new field of engineering called spintronics. In current solid-state memory devices you store and control the flow of electrical charge. Here, we store and control the flow of the spin of an electron, The promise of racetrack memory - for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket - could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet,“ said Parkin.
Source: CrunchGear
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