IBM Unveils Memory Technology Breakthough
IBM is developing a new type of ultra-low-cost solid-state memory featuring a storage capacity that vastly exceeds what today’s hard disk drives can provide. Called racetrack memory, the technology may one day replace hard disk drives in PCs, laptops and servers as well as displace flash memory chips in smartphones, digital cameras, and tablets.
The radically new type of storage memory is based on a breakthrough technology known as spintronics, which manipulates the two types of independent electrons found in electrical current — called the “spin-up” and “spin-down” electrons. The goal is to enable computing devices to store bits of information by manipulating the magnetic state of a region within a nanowire that is just a few tens of nanometers wide.
“We discovered that domain walls don’t hit peak acceleration as soon as the current is turned on — it takes them exactly the same time and distance to hit peak acceleration as it does to decelerate and eventually come to a stop,” said IBM Research Fellow Dr. Stuart Parkin on Thursday. “Now we know domain walls can be positioned precisely along the racetrack simply by varying the length of the current pulses, even though the walls have mass.”
Conventional hard disk drives remain popular because they are cheap, but the technology is also slow, prone to read/write errors, and can suffer irreversible damage if dropped or hit. Though solid-state memory chips are superfast and far more reliable, they also cost about 100 times more per gigabyte of memory than hard disk counterparts.
Nanowire racetrack technology promises to bring the benefits of solid-state construction to PC and server memory storage without a comparable boost in cost, IBM researchers observed. Even mobile handheld devices may one day ship with astounding amounts of storage memory, they added.
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