When we're talking long periods of time, we're often hard pressed to find a reliable storage medium where we can back up our data. This is usually because these units break down after a period of use. A new team composed mostly of grad students have come up with a solution for this problem. Story in the full article.

Jagadeesh Moodera isn't the only researcher who "tinkers" with spintronics. Scientists from all over the world are seeing humongous potential in this technology. In fact, magnetic RAM, an offshoot technology brought about by spintronics, might just be the next big thing to SRAM, DRAM, or Flash memory.

Spintronics might just defy Moore's Law, but only if researchers are able to find the right material to be used. Cobalt green (a green pigment mixture of zinc oxide and cobalt used in 18th century paintings), indium oxide, and titanium oxide are the best candidates for the spintronics experiments. The big question is how to jam electrons inside the chips without spilling them. If scientists are able to do this, we're seeing faster, cheaper, and more efficient RAM chips in the future.

There are barriers, of course, such as how to avoid the loss of polarization and the consequences of the interaction of these materials with silicon. In short, there's still much to be done, and it may take several years for another breakthrough.

But the scientists are optimistic. Neil Savage says, "to apply spintronics to logic circuits, scientists have to figure out how to put the spin they want into the transistor and how to detect it on the other side once the circuit has manipulated it." If there's a way to figure this out, it won't be another ten years before MRAM dominates the memory technology market.