The Wired Magazine article on Stuart Parkin is now available on-line...
...and it outlines the difficulties in creating the layer of ferromagnetic layer needed to make this technology a practical solution.
wired.com
Parkin has already built prototype MRAM chips that store about 1 Kbyte of data. That's not much, but he's confident he can ramp up memory capacity in the next few years and produce a chip that is smaller and faster, stores more data, and costs less to manufacture than DRAM. Parkin won't say exactly how long it will take IBM to do this, but analysts outside the company believe it will happen in less than five years.
Big Blue wanted Parkin to create new kinds of layered magnetic materials and analyze them for use in mass storage. "But the MBE system was a big, cumbersome instrument, very time-consuming to use," says Parkin. A year later, he turned the machine over to another scientist, abandoning the MBE experiments but using $50,000 left over from the original project to construct something called a sputtering chamber. A vacuum cylinder about the size of a washing machine, the chamber can slam atoms of gas into various substances, breaking off tiny shavings that cling to whatever material is nearby. This is basically a brute-force way to very quickly deposit layers of elements on a surface, which can then be tested for its ability to hold magnetic data.
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