Images: IBM's racetrack memory

IBM fellow Stuart Parkin (right) is one of the authors of a paper on racetrack memory being published in the April 11 edition of Science.

In racetrack memory, information is stored in the domain walls, or boundaries, between magnetic regions on a wire. The domain walls are then shuttled up or down the wire via electrical pulses toward another component that can interpret whether the domain wall represents a "1" or a "0."

"We have a series of zeros and ones and our objective is to shift that information to and fro without upsetting it," said Parkin (seen here in a photo taken earlier this year). "Unlike a hard drive, we have no moving parts. We have no moving atoms. We just have magnetic moments."

In the next two to four years, IBM hopes to create a complete, working prototype of a racetrack chip with an integrated device that can read the data shuttling across the wire, said Parkin.