Researchers at the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Leeds have discovered a way to precisely control the magnetic spins in thin magnetic films, which can be used to store the information.
The current memory storage technology has been totally exploited and there is little scope that the technology can improve further.
In the current technology we use faster silicon chips that is RAM to fetch information or data from the comparatively slow memory system that is hard disk.
The problem with this technology is that RAM is a volatile memory and all its data is lost once the power is cut off. Hard disk is a permanent storage but it does not cope with the speed of the processors that are being developed and for that purpose we use the fastest and the most expensive type of memory system that we call as Cache memory.
Since Cache Memory is very expensive so we cannot use it in abundance and we have only a few MBs in our system.
The recent research has given an answer to all these problems. The technology involves using high energy beams of Gallium ions to artificially control the direction of magnetic field in the regions of cobalt films that are just a few atoms thick. This direction of the field can be used to store data. For example the upward and downward direction can correspond to either ‘0′ or ‘1′ the only digits that a computer understands.
Researchers have also commented that this direction of the magnetic area can be easily read by measuring their electrical resistance. This can be done at a much faster pace than the technology that is currently in use for reading data from a hard disk.
These directions can also be changed from up to down or vice-versa with a short pulse of electrical current thus making the write mechanism much quicker.
This technology will make much faster memory chips that will not be volatile as today’s RAM. In case of a power cut you will not have to worry about your data as everything will be retrieved once the power is back. This will enable us to have faster computers and that too without a RAM.
Another similar technology is MRAM whose prototypes have already been developed by many companies. However this technology uses stray magnetic fields generated by the wires that carry high electric current this limits the density of Information Storage.
In contrast the Bath approach will open a new door for the memory systems making the computers faster and more reliable than any of the current systems.
Via: physorg
