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Prof wins grant to design low-cost MRAM chips
2:42 p.m., March 21, 2007--Siu-Tat Chui, University of Delaware professor of physics and astronomy, has won a $450,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop stable, magnetic-random-access-memory (MRAM) chips that would replace the random access memory (RAM) commonly used in computers. Chui, who focuses on theoretical research in condensed matter physics, will be working in collaboration with Sam Bader, chief scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, to find more reliable ways to write data to MRAM and then develop an experimental demonstration of the technique. “The goal is to replace the RAM in computers,” Chui said. “For present RAM, energy is required to maintain the memory. When power is turned off, the memory goes away. For MRAM, no power is required to maintain the memory.” Chui explained that MRAM records information in the form of zeros and ones on nanostructures on films measuring 0.3 micron by 0.6 micron by 0.01 micron. The information is stored in the magnetic nanostructures by turning them left and right. “We are trying to understand--to find out how to consistently address every bit without error and, therefore, develop high density,” Chui said. “When you have an error in a chip, an airplane can go down, so you can't have any error. It's zero tolerance.” MRAM, which is already in limited use, including as embedded memory in automobiles, costs about $20 for only half a megabyte, while the same amount of money can buy one gigabyte of RAM, a factor of 2,000, Chui said. “If it works, MRAM would save energy,” Chui said. “It also would have faster response time with low power consumption. It can then be used to replace the RAM in devices such as iPods, which have been using flash memory, but they are much slower.” Chui received his bachelor's degree in physics from McGill University in Canada in 1969. He earned a doctoral degree in physics in 1972 from Princeton University, where he was an instructor from 1972-73. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1973-75 and taught as an assistant professor at SUNY-Albany from 1975 until he joined UD's Bartol Research Foundation in 1979. Chui has served as visiting professor at the University of Maryland, the Institute of Materials Research of Tohoku University in Japan, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Umea University in Sweden and the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Beijing. Chui's main interests are in the areas of magnetism, phase transition and critical phenomena, and electron-electron correlation effects. He recently helped develop a viable high-temperature permanent magnet and discovered a new small magnetic structure that can be an order of magnitude more sensitive than current hard disk sensors. Article by Martin Mbugua |
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