Industry News Briefs Summary

An IBM research team has developed a new generation of memory that combines the high performance and reliability of solid state "flash" memory, stored in microchips, with the high capacity of the PC's hard disk drive, which is cheap but contains moving parts and is slow. IBM's recently disclosed "Magnetic Race-Track Memory is a technology for practical applications that's five to ten years away. The mechanism for this technology is the movement of domain walls. Memory bits are stored perpendicularly on a silicon substrate. The orientation of the bit stream will determine if it is a 1 or a 0. Current pulses are used to move the domain walls. The direction of the current pulse controls the direction of the domain wall movement.