In an experimental IBM physics lab, Stuart S. P. Parkin is working on an invention that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of 100, in the same amount of space.

Parkin has already made seemingly impossible feats become reality. He is the mind behind the huge increases in digital storage made possible by giant magnetoresistance, or GMR.

This is the technology that made iPods and Google-style data centers come to life.

The new technology, dubbed "racetrack memory," involves standing billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip. An electric current then slides tiny magnets along each of the wires to be written and read as digital ones and zeros.

The magnets move along the wires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second, which makes it possible to read and write magnetic regions far faster than existing storage technologies.

Racetrack memory has the potential to surpass flash memory chips and computer hard disks. If it succeeds, it will actually take microelectronics into the third dimension, negating the two-dimensional limits of Moore’s Law, which says that the possible number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles roughly every 18 months.

Further, the storage capacity of racetrack memory would make a "disk drive on a chip" possible, while allowing consumers to carry a college library’s worth of data on a small, portable device.

New York Times September 11, 2007