IBM allies with Stanford for spintronics

The project, called the Spintronics Science and Application Centre, was announced late Sunday in The New York Times. It will be based out of IBM's Almaden Research facility in San Jose, California, and the nearby Palo Alto, California, campus of Stanford University.

Spintronics revolves around precisely controlling the magnetic field emanating from a thin film. Magnetic fields create electrical resistance, and high and low levels of resistance can be assigned a one or zero designation. By controlling the magnetic field and interpreting the resistance levels at various points on the film, digital data is created.

The name derives from the fact that the electrons are said to spin in parallel, or in different directions. It is, however, a metaphor.

Spintronics has actually been around for years. IBM produced disk drive heads, called giant magnoresistive (GMR) heads, taking advantage of these properties in 1997.

Magnetic random access memory (MRAM) could become the next product where spintronics could be incorporated. Ideally, MRAM will be able to store a substantial amount of data, consume little energy, and operate at a much faster rate than conventional flash memory. It could also last forever.

Finding a replacement for flash, which is used in cellphones, memory cards in digital cameras and other devices, is an urgent business in the semiconductor market. Demand for flash is growing extremely rapidly.

The basic technology behind flash, however, is getting more difficult to advance and nearly every major manufacturer is examining alternatives.

Critics and competitors, though, point out that MRAM is far from being the anointed successor. MRAM is unconventional and IBM has to show it can mass produce it cheaply. Intel has also pointed out that the memory cell sizes are large, which makes it difficult to slip into small devices like digital cameras. Others have said that the changes in resistance are too subtle and can potentially lead to data corruption, a contention that IBM disagrees with.

Last June, IBM and Infineon published a paper describing how the companies produced an MRAM chip on the 180-nanometre manufacturing process that held 128 kilobits of data. At the time, the two companies promised to more fully demonstrate MRAM in early 2004 and predicted that MRAM could start to produce conventional flash memory by 2005.

Further out, spintronic principles could be used to flip some kinds of transistors flip off and on. An Intel spokeswoman said that this is currently one of the promising areas of long-term research at some universities right now, but it might not hit the stage of commercial implementation around 2021.

Still, it might come in handy. Researchers at Intel last year published a paper that chip makers will probably hit a looming barrier in Moore's Law that could well prevent chip designers from gaining performance by shrinking their chips around that time, the engine behind the exponential growth in computer power for more than three decades.