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Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again
Nrbelex writes "Stuart S. P. Parkin, an I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, thinks he is poised to bring about a breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. This is the man who pioneered exploiting the giant magnetoresistance effect in the 90s, causing disk storage to jump ahead of the Moore's Law curve. If he proves successful in developing 'racetrack memory,' he will create a universal computer memory, one that can potentially replace DRAM and flash memory chips, and make a 'disk drive on a chip' possible. It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say."
Read what the article actually says - "Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures." Though he may have been absolutely critical to making GMR hard drives (I don't know the history) credit for discovery of GMR goes to Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert. You might be able to call Parkin the inventor of GMR hard drives, though.
Here's the concept, with a nice animated gif: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/spinaps/research/sd/?racetrack
The genius of the design is that the bits can be moved along the nanowires, allowing tens to hundreds of bits or maybe more to be accessed by only one reader. The readers can be fabricated in an array on a chip, and the wires can be hung from above, storing the data vertically. AFAIK they haven't yet gotten to the point of figuring out fabrication issues for the nanowire parts, like making a vertically oriented array and aligning them to readers. So far they have been working on getting the racetrack part working. That is, they have been working on using an electric current to shift magnetic domains longitudinally along a nanowire, and reading/writing the domains. And actually, the article seems to suggest that they are ignoring the 3-dimensional nanowire fabrication issues for now, and are going to make prototypes with the wires fabricated traditionally, 2-dimensionally, on a chip surface, which may still be competitive with Flash.
As for heat issues, Hopefully the amount of current necessary will be small and thus the wires themselves will generate little heat. I would imagine that this design would have fewer transistors than, say, a DRAM, since the transistors will not be storing the data themselves. The transistors remain 2-dimensional, only on the chip surface. The wires are the only 3-dimensional part.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
New Scientist covered this a lifetime ago.
This New Scientist article from centuries ago is slightly clearer.
So true. I'm one of the people in the small community of physics.... and he didn't invent GMR. First publication was in 88 by Baibich. Not to discount the contributions that Parkin has made, but he was not the inventor nor would making the claim that he is the single most important person in the field be correct...
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