Stuart Parkin, who studied the fundamental physics of magnetic material his entire career, developed a new way to store information. He developed a memory chip with the huge storage capacity of a magnetic hard drive, the durability of electronic flash memory, and speed greater than both. He calls this new technology racetrack memory. Magnetic disk drives and solid-state memory technologies are two-dimensional and are continuing to become smaller and smaller, but Parkin believes they will soon reach their size limit. So this racetrack memory is going off a different idea. It is three-dimensional.
The key to this is an arrangements of U-shaped magnetic nanowires that are arranged vertically like trees in a forest. The nanowires have regions of different magnetic polarities, and boundaries between them represent 1s or os, depending on the polarities. When a spin-polarized current passes through the nanowire, the magnetic pattern is pushed along like cars speeding down a racetrack. At the bottom of the U, the magnetic boundaries encounter a pair of tiny devices that read and write data.
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