Racetrack Memory

Sometimes, I feel everyone must know about some of the most revolutionary changes or proposed changes in technology. Unfortunately, not many people keep track of it as it is a very very tedious job (unless you’re an expert and know where to look for it ). I see so many many advances in technology that it seems Chennai (or India for that matter) is far far behind the world in such cases. Some examples would be ‘The Grid’ (if you don’t know what that is, its a Fibre Optic network which has been laid through Europe by CERN for analysing data from the LHC. Its about 10000 times faster than the traditional connections and allows a feature movie download in 5 seconds (Whoa ma gawd!) ) and this, the ‘Racetrack memory’ among many others. So, I thought about blogging it to let some of my more tech-savvy friends to read about it.

So, what is this ‘Racetrack Memory’? This, according to the scientists who have proposed its development, is the most advanced means of memory storage of the next generation. It makes the now predominant Solid State Random Access Memory and the Magnetic Hard Disk Drive means of memory storage literally pale in comparison. Although it is in its initial stages of development, it has been found to be feasible and is estimated to be replacing older data storage means within this decade.

With this new memory technology, you can store upto a whopping 500,000 songs on your iPod or nearly 3500 movies … about a 100 times more than is possible in today’s high memory storage equipments. For a music buff like me, this should be a god given boon if it becomes reality. There also remains the possibility of computers coming into existence with lightning fast boot times instead of the 100 or more seconds they take in the present scenario (apparently, this is not unique with the Windows OS alone!)

Racetrack Memory is poised to replace a highly susceptible part of today’s memory storage equipment - moving solid state parts which are literally the cause of their premature ‘death’ and their extreme slack in retrieving and storing data (calling a millisecond or even a second as a slack is a bit too much but still..). This new technology on the other hand is going to be based on the highly perceptible effect of magnetism (caused by electron spin according to the quantum theory).

Now, to the real and finer details. The usual and now predominant memory storage devices are based on the shuffling of small packets of electronic charge around. Racetrack Memory on the other hand counts the ‘up’ and ‘down’ spin of electrons as 1’s and 0’s (which on the other hand are raw units of information storage in any PC) and stores the information in these patterns. The information races around a microscopic magnetic track (hence the name - ‘Racetrack’ memory) and is stored in nanowires which are about a 1000th of human hair in width. So, essentially, a fully fledged memory chip using this technology can have billions of nanowires along the edge of a chip and hence store hundreds of times the data present memory storage systems can handle in the same physical space.

The other 2 means of memory storage - random access Flash memory and the magnetic hard disk drive have their own problems. The former has the drawback that even though it is very fast in reading data, it is absolutely slow in writing them. Although it doesn’t have any moving parts, it is slightly damaged with each use and rewrite and so, cannot be used more than a few thousand times. The latter, on the other hand, has moving parts, which as I have said are a bane to any memory storage devices. Of course, this is barring the fact that it is very very cheap compared to the former.

Such absolutely stunning amount of memory storage is expected to trigger the invention of devices and applications (softwares mainly) that cannot even be imagined at this point of time. Although the current version has only 2 dimensions of memory storage, the creators are working on a higher 3D one (the problem being the complex task of creating a feasible algorithm to write and read data efficiently).

I for one will be looking forward to this advancement.

Rapster