Caption: A new design for comuter memory would send information shooting along wires like cars along a racetrack. Image source: Jina Lee, Wikimedia Commons.
The word racetrack has quite a history in American culture. It conjures up images of horse racing, with beautiful animals, colorful spectators, cheap hot dogs, and expensive gambling. Perhaps more prominently, it brings automobiles to mind. The Ford Model-T made cars affordable, and Prohibition catalyzed the development of brawny speedsters that could outmuscle the police cruisers, but it was the automobile’s marriage to the racetrack that finally transformed stock car racing into the booming phenomenon that it is today. Now a team of researchers at IBM lead by Stuart Parkin would like us to start associating the word with computer memory.
Racetrack Memory, as the research team has coined it, is a new idea that could compete with some of the most popular memory devices in use today. In an article published in the December 24th issue of the journal Science, Parkin and collaborators have measured some key features of magnetism that bring the idea one step closer to viability.
Devices today almost all store their memory using either FLASH or magnetic hard drives. Both technologies have undergone dizzying improvements recently in storage capacity, cost, and reading and writing speed. Still, they have a few inherent drawbacks. Traditional magnetic hard drives are inexpensive and have an enormous storage capacity. However, they require moving parts, which costs a device energy and consequently battery life. FLASH memory has no moving parts, but it takes a relatively long time to write information, and FLASH continues to be more expensive than magnetic hard drives.