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Nonvolatile Memory Discards Hard Drives

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

The U.S. Navy has contracted for a radically-new magnetic memory device that will possibly eliminate the need for hard drives. Because the memory is totally electronic, there are no mechanical functions to perform, and the memory provides instant-on capability for computers.

The memory is nonvolatile; it won't lose its contents when the power is turned off. Typically hard drives are used as nonvolatile memory storage for today's personal computers. But because hard drives are mechanical there is a significant boot-up time and access time when data is required is much longer than compared to the new instant-on memory.

A small Minnesota firm, Nonvolatile Electronics Inc., will develop the technology to produce the instant-on memory devices on a commercial scale. The company was founded in 1989 by James Daughton, who pioneered the field with Honeywell.

The Navy anticipates putting 400 gigabits in a square inch of the new memory. This is 50 GB (gigabytes), about the largest capacity of today's retail hard drives.

The new memory uses tiny magnetic doughnuts. The doughnut's ability to transmit electric current can be influence by magnetic fields. This technology doesn't even require transistors to act as on-off switches. The doughnuts maintain magnetic on/off states.

The new memory is known by two names: vertical giant magnetoresistance random access memory (VRAM) and magnetic random access memory (MRAM). We'll have to take a poll to see which name sticks.

One of the neatest results of this new memory is that it get's more effective the smaller the doughnuts. So, it may be the perfect storage medium for micro-tiny devices.

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References

Nonvolatile Electronics, Inc.
Naval Research Lab
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updated April 9, 2000
http://dgl.com/itinfo/2000/it000409.html