Is it possible to save whole movie of the year into a phone?

Now, IBM researchers are moving closer to commercializing the testing technology that could save a cellphone for all the movies made this year.

That's the technology that IBM researcher Stuart Parkin has developed since 2004, called " racetrack memory ." Unlike the hard drive (using the motor to spin the magnetic atom), racetrack memory uses electric current to move the collection of electrons, called "domain walls" (domain wall) of magnetic, Up and down a very small string. " It's like a kind of magnetic field that we're moving along without moving the atoms, " Parkin said.

By moving these domain walls to the reader, racetrack will be able to read and write data much faster, using less energy than today's storage devices. " It will access the first bit a million times faster, use much less energy, and it will not break down ," Parkin said.

Parkin thinks that racetrack can have a big impact on the storage capacity of popular electronic devices such as cell phones. With the right funding, he thinks it will take him 2-5 years to build a data storage chip that is 100 times more expensive than current flash memory chips. Using wire lengths of a few microns, about 30 nanometers wide (about 1 in 1,000th the thickness of a human hair), the first racetrack chips could store hundreds of gigabytes or even a few tenths of data, Parkin said.

Parkin's team has developed the original racetrack - chips that can read and write simple data sets - but so far there is an unanswered question: exactly are these domain walls moving? What?

According to Parkin, there is still a lot to do before the racetrack becomes a reality. However, now, the problem has been more realistic and less theoretical. " We can only solve it by building prototypes and testing them for a while, " Parkin said.

The following video introduces the IBM racetrack concept: