Shrinking Powerhouses

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Shrinking Powerhouses

As storage density rises exponentially, researchers worldwide are tearing down technology barriers in their quest for the ultimate storage material.

In a world increasingly defined by the flow of data, it is easy to forget a fundamental fact about bits and bytes–ultimately they must reside in chunks of matter. Data must be embodied in marks on a piece of paper, a swarm of electrons in an integrated circuit, a herd of magnetic spins on the surface of a hard disk or patterns of light in a computer display. The ability to find materials that can be processed, combined and formed into ever smaller, faster and more reliable devices has largely defined the progress of computer technology over the past half century. Today, the limit to such progress is looming. The materials that have served the industry so well for so long will need to be reworked, rethought and, in some cases, replaced. In research laboratories worldwide, numerous projects are devoted to ‘frontier materials’–novel substances that can do a job better than existing ones or that can do something no other material can.

Some of the research, says Thomas
Theis, Director, Physical Sciences, Thomas J Watson Research Center, IBM, is aimed simply at extending current technologies–giving engineers the materials they need to make incremental improvements in existing devices. Other research is aimed at opening up completely new capabilities. For instance, synthesized materials that exhibit giant magnetoresistance–large changes in resistance in response to an applied magnetic field–with low magnetic fields and at room temperature. This research has allowed the development of a fundamentally different type of read head for magnetic hard disks, one that is far more sensitive than conventional read heads. Indeed, research in that area continues to yield a stream of innovations, inventions and discoveries.

Both sorts of investigation–incremental and revolutionary–are necessary, Theis says, since incremental advances tend to bring a technology to the point where it can no longer be easily improved and where a new approach is needed to continue the progress. Moreover, what was speculative exploration of new materials five years ago may be incremental materials engineering today.