Memory - Page 12

In two papers published in the April 11 issue of Science, IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin and colleagues at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose describe both the fundamentals of a technology dubbed "racetrack" memory as well as a milestone in that technology. This milestone could lead to electronic devices capable of storing far more data in the same amount of space than is possible today, with lightning-fast boot times, far lower cost and unprecedented stability and durability.

Within the next ten years, racetrack memory, so named because the data "races" around the wire "track," could lead to solid state electronic devices - with no moving parts, and therefore more durable - capable of holding far more data in the same amount of space than is possible today. For example, this technology could enable a handheld device such as an mp3 player to store around 500,000 songs or around 3,500 movies - 100 times more than is possible today - with far lower cost and power consumption. The devices would not only store vastly more information in the same space, but also require much less power and generate much less heat, and be practically unbreakable; the result: massive amounts of personal storage that could run on a single battery for weeks at a time and last for decades.

For nearly fifty years, scientists have explored the possibility of storing information in magnetic domain walls, which are the boundaries between magnetic regions or "domains" in magnetic materials. Until now, manipulating domain walls was expensive, complex, and used significant power to generate the fields necessary to do so. In the paper describing their milestone, "Current Controlled Magnetic Domain-Wall Nanowire Shift Register," Dr. Parkin and his team describe how this long-standing obstacle can be overcome by taking advantage of the interaction of spin polarized current with magnetization in the domain walls; this results in a spin transfer torque on the domain wall, causing it to move. The use of spin momentum transfer considerably simplifies the memory device since the current is passed directly across the domain wall without the need for any additional field generators.

Read more here (Nanotechnology now)

For the first nine months of fiscal 2008, product sales increased 25% to $12.83 million from $10.23 million for the first nine months of fiscal 2007. Total revenue increased 22% to $14.48 million for the first nine months of fiscal 2008 from $11.90 million for the prior-year period. Net income for the nine months of fiscal 2008 was $4.93 million, or $1.04 per diluted share compared to $3.23 million, or $0.67 per diluted share, for the first nine months of fiscal 2007.

US scientists have come up with a new mechanism that would control magnetic memory of the computers to enable more accurately write and store information in the hard drives. The new technology will switch a magnetic nanoparticle without any magnetic field.

The latest research now aims at empowering computers with magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM). In MRAM, data is stored in magnetic storage elements that consist of two layers; each one is separated by a thin non-magnetic spacer.

Scientists who dream of shrinking computers to the nanoscale look to atomic spin as one possible building block for both processor and memory, yet setting the spin of an atom, let alone measuring it, has been a challenge.

Now, University of California, Berkeley, physicists have succeeded in measuring the spin of a single atom, moving one step closer to quantum computers and "spintronic" devices built from nanoscale transistors based on atomic spin.

Crommie, UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Yossi Yayon and graduate student Victor W. Brar succeeded by creating islands of cobalt atoms on a cold copper substrate (4.8 Kelvin, or -451 degrees Fahrenheit) and sprinkling these islands with atoms of either iron or chromium.

Employing a relatively new technique called low-temperature spin-polarized scanning tunneling spectroscopy - essentially a scanning, tunneling microscope that can probe the spin and energy-dependent electron density of a surface - they were able to determine the spin of isolated adatoms atop these cobalt nanoislands.

Read more here (UCBerkeley news) 

 

IBM has linked with Japan's TDK to develop so-called spin torque transfer RAM (random access memory) or STT-RAM. In STT-RAM, an electric current is applied to a magnet to change the direction of the magnetic field. The direction of the magnetic field (up-and-down or left-to-right) causes a change in resistance, and the different levels of resistance register as 1s or 0s.

Under the current plan, IBM and TDK, an integral player in magnetic recording components for hard drives, will develop a 65-nanometer prototype within the next four years.

Previously, IBM had been working on a more conventional type of magnetic memory called MRAM. However, the company has been having trouble shrinking the transistors on these chips.

In an important step toward future data-storage technologies based on magnetism, a research group has determined how to control the magnetization of a “magnetic vortex,” a curling nanometer-sized magnetic structure present within tiny, millionth-of-a-meter-sized magnetic disks. Understanding the behavior of this type of structure is one of the main requirements of magnetic data-storage development.

Across the globe, teams of researchers are working to build viable spin-based electronic devices – spintronics – using spin currents. This group's work opens the possibility that simple magnetic disks can serve as the building blocks for spintronic devices like memory cells, where each bit of information would be stored as the direction of the vortex-core's field. Vortex-core switching could be an efficient way of writing data to a memory device.

Read more here (Physorg)

Leeds physicists are leading a new £2.3m project to make new materials which would allow computer memory and other components to use magnetism rather than conventional electrical charges, paving the way for smaller, faster gadgets. 

Magnetism in microelectronic components - spintronics - is already used for reading high performance hard disks, like those in iPods. A similar device can also store information magnetically on a memory chip, instead of needing an electric charge. Charges leak away and have to be replenished a thousand times a second, but magnetism doesn't require a power supply. It can also be used to control the flow of electrons in a component so a chip could re-configure itself in the most effective way for each calculation it handled.

NVE Corporation said that it has been notified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that two patents are expected to be granted today. The patents are titled "Two-Axis Magnetic Field Sensor" and "Superparamagnetic Devices."

The Two-Axis Magnetic Field Sensor is patent number 7,054,114, and is the grant of a patent under the application published by the USPTO as number 2004-0137275. The invention is for a spintronic device that can detect the magnitude and orientation of magnetic fields. Applications for such devices might include Magnetoresitive Random Access Memory (MRAM), or military, industrial, and medical sensors.