Kryder, Kim Investigate What Comes After Hard Drives
October 27, 2009
What comes after hard drives? No one can be totally certain, but University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Mark Kryder — founder of the DSSC and chief technical officer and senior vice president of research (retired) at Seagate Technology — has a few ideas. And people are starting to notice.
Kryder and ECE graduate student Chang Soo Kim recently completed a study, delivered at Intermag 2009 and published in the October 2009 edition of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, called "After Hard Drives — What Comes Next?" In the study, Kryder and Kim investigate 13 different nonvolatile memory technologies viewed as being capable of replacing hard disk drives and analyze their likelihood of doing so by 2020 on a cost-per-terabyte basis.
According to the paper, one of the study's major conclusions is that it will be challenging for any solid state technology to compete with hard drives on a cost-per-terabyte basis because the ITRS lithography roadmap limits the density that most alternative technologies can achieve. Technologies with the best opportunity have a small cell size and the capability of storing multiple bits per cell, and include phase change random access memory (PCRAM) and spin transfer torque random access memory (STTRAM).
These results were recently featured in an article on Physorg.com, a web-based science, research and technology news service that reaches 1.75 million scientists, researchers and engineers every month. The article highlights the pair's results and provides an overview of PCRAM and STTRAM technologies and why they're leading the pack in terms of competitiveness with HDDs. Kryder also spoke with the news outlet about why such a study was important.
"Feedback from industrial associates has indicated that having a structured set of criteria to evaluate technologies was very useful and that the study has helped them prioritize the technologies that they look at," Kryder told Physorg.com. "This study allowed us to identify the most promising technologies on which to work, and we are now attempting to develop multilevel cell STTRAM."
To read the entire story, visit www.physorg.com/news175505861.html. For a complete PDF of Kryder and Kim's study, click here.
