Will there ever come a day when a single handheld MP3 player can store 3,500 movies? IBM researchers think that a new technology called "racetrack" memory will make this possible within the next ten years.

Aside from performance, better relability and lower prices could be on the way, too. Unlike magnetic disk drives, racetrack memory has no moving parts. Moreover, unlike flash memory, it can be endlessly rewritten with no wear and tear, according to IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin and his colleagues at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

In an article in the April 11 issue of Science, the IBM researchers detail how they have managed to store information in columns of magnetic material, or "racetracks," arranged either perpendicularly or horizontally on the surface of a silicon wafer.

Racetrack memory takes advantage of the interaction of "spin polarized current" with magnetization in the "domain walls," or the boundaries between magnetic regions or "domains" in magentic materials. Essentially, data races around a wire "track" inside the silicon wafer, the IBM researchers say.

"Recent developments in the controlled movement of domain walls in magnetic nanowires by short pulses of spin-polarized current give promise of a nonvolatile memory device with the high performance and reliability of conventional solid-state memory but at the low cost of conventional magnetic disk drive storage," according to the abstract for the article in Science.

Ultimately, the researchers expect spintronics to move into the third dimension, with 3D racetrack memory devices that will be even faster and cheaper, since they won't be dependent on the miniaturization dictates of Moore's Law.