Imagine taking a nanowire, taking a square micron portion on its surface, drill down into it, and etch a racetrack of spin-polarized bits. Essentially those areas of silicon would be 1 micron wide and 10 microns high, 10 times the density of conventional flash memory. As the technology matures, its creator Stuart Parkin, believes it will reach 100 times the density, effectively replacing hard disks.
Patented by IBM in 2004, Parkin developed the spin valve sensing device in 1989, and later the technology for random access memory in 1999.
The article by InformationWeek gives a better description on the technology:
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.
While storage just isn’t storage if the data can’t be accessed, last year IBM demonstrated the read process as sensing changes in the resistance in the wire. Progress is being made to eventually access large quantities of bits at a time.
I’ll be adding this to my future watch list of improving technologies. Now if only consumer based holographic storage were available.
Source doc: informationweek
