RACETRACK-More Data in Smaller Space

‘Racetrack’ is a new generation of memory technology which could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say. The commercially available flash drives with multiple memory chips store up to 64 gigabytes of data. Capacity is expected to reach about 50 gigabytes on a single chip in the next half-decade.

Although flash drives can read data quickly, it is very slow at storing it. That has led the industry on a hysterical hunt for alternative storage technologies that might unseat flash.

The storage devices built on “Racetrack technology” will have the ability to store 100 times more data than is possible today, by consuming less power and generate much less heat, lightning fast boot times, low cost and unprecedented durability and stability. It shrank the mainframe computer to fit on the desktop, shrank it again to fit on our laps and again to fit into our shirt pockets.

IBM who is the real inventor of this technology says 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. This data storage medium is based on spintronics-a phenomenon that uses quantum spin states of electrons and their charge to store data. Since racetrack memory has no moving parts, it has no wear-out mechanism and so can be rewritten endlessly without any wear and tear.

For nearly fifty years, scientists have explored the possibility of storing information inside the walls that exist between magnetic domains (called magnetic domain wall), but to date manipulating such walls has been too expensive 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(IBM research center) 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.

His idea is to stand billions of ultra fine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip — hence the name racetrack — and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only sub molecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond — far faster than existing storage technologies.