Racetrack memory promises major storage expansion for devices

Stephen Withers
Friday, 11 April 2008 03:23

New non-volatile memory technologies pop up from time to time, but they don't always make a lasting impression. Remember bubble memory? What about FRAM? Now IBM reckons its 'racetrack' memory could deliver the performance and reliability of flash memory with the low cost and high capacity of hard drives.

Racetrack memory could provide handheld devices such as MP3 players and phones with 100 times more storage than they contain today, but with "far lower cost and power consumption", according to IBM officials.

Racetrack memory uses columns of magnetic material on the surface of a silicon wafer. Just as data can stored magnetically on hard disks, it can be stored on this material. The difference is that instead of moving the medium, the magnetic domains move within these columns.

The breakthrough achieved by scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center is a major simplification of the way magnetic domains are manipulated.

The development opens up the possibility of 3D racetrack devices that are not limited to the surface of a wafer, allowing the construction of faster and cheaper devices.

"We expect that our exploration of a wide variety of materials and structures will provide new insight into domain wall dynamics driven by current, making possible domain wall based memory and even logic devices that were previously inconceivable," said IBM fellow Stuart Parkin.

"It will not only change the way we look at storage, but the way we look at processing information. We're moving into a world that is more data-centric than computing-centric."

Unlike flash, racetrack memory is not damaged by each write operation and is therefore expected to have a longer useful life in applications that involve frequently changing data.