New Memory Chip

According to the article Racetrack Memory, IBM fellow Stuart Parkin is using nanowires to create a memory chip that stores more memory. Since IBM has sold their hard drive business, Parkin has developed a new way to store information. This memory chip has a huge storage capacity, the durability of an electronic flash memory, and the speed of both. Combining the two, Parkin has come up with the new technology “racetrack memory”. Parkin says that their ideas are totally different from other memory because it’s three dimensional. It is a U-shaped magnetic nanowire, arranged vertically like trees (in a forest). The nanowires have regions with different magnetic polarities. The boundaries between the regions represent 1s and 0s. The base of the U encounters a pair of devices that reads and writes the data. Parkin hopes to reach 10 bits along the wire because racetrack memory would be competitive with flash storage. If Parkin’s team can manage 100 bits, racetrack memory could replace hard drives. If this design is successful, racetrack could replace all forms of memory.

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22115