Crystal Ball Technical Analysis Review on Cosco

With the high sell down volume on 10th April 2008 it is unlikely that price will be moving up soon unless some Big Boys agressive buy up happens. Those who sold in large volume are probably not going to buy back until better bargain prices. The important immediate support now is $2.80 if this support fails then we need to project downwards. For this review we will just use Fibonacci Extension as a guide to obtain some potential support levels. At 61.8 retracement level is $2.70 and at 78.2% retracement level is $2.37.

Racetrack memory

In computer data storage, racetrack memory is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by Stuart Parkin, as well as teams at various other locations.^[1] In early 2008 a 3-bit version was successfully demonstrated

Physics

IBM's version of racetrack uses spin-coherent electric current to move the magnetic domains along an U-shaped nanoscopic wire. As current is passing through the wire, the domains move over the magnetic read/write heads positioned at the bottom of the U, which alter the domains to record patterns of bits. A memory device is made up of many such wires and read/write elements.

Comparison to flash memory

The theoretical density of racetrack memory is much higher than comparable devices such as Flash RAM, estimates suggesting the maximum areal density is between 10 and 100 times the best possible Flash devices. Flash devices are already built on the latest fabs at 45 nm, and there are problems that suggest scaling down to 30 nm may be a lower fundamental limit. Racetrack is not much smaller, the wires about 5 to 10 nm across, but by arranging them vertically the devices become three dimensional, gaining density.

Additionally, Flash requires large voltage to reset a "cell" in order to be written to. This requires a device known as a charge pump to provide the required voltage, and the pump takes time to build up a charge. This limits the write speeds of Flash to many times slower than reads, up to 1000 times. This limits its usage in many applications. Additionally the action of sending this large voltage into the cells degrades them mechanically, so Flash has a limited lifetime, between 10,000 and 100,000 writes. Flash memory devices use a variety of techniques to avoid writing to the same cell if possible, but they only limit the problem, not eliminate it.

Racetrack has neither of these problems. Reading and writing is fairly symmetrical and is limited primarily by the time it takes for the magnetic pattern to be moved across the read/write heads.

Development difficulties

One limitation of the early experimental devices was that the magnetic domains could only be pushed slowly through the wires, requiring current pulses on the orders of microseconds to move them successfully. This was unexpected, and led to performance roughly equal to hard drives, as much as 1000 times slower than predicted. Recent research at the University of Hamburg has traced this problem to microscopic imperfections in the crystal structure of the wires which led to the domains becoming "stuck" at these imperfections. Using an x-ray microscope to directly image the boundaries between the domains, their research found that domain walls would be moved by pulses as short as a few nanoseconds when these imperfections were absent. This corresponds to a macroscopic speed of about 110 m/s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_memory

spintronic devices

Conventional electronic devices rely on the transport of electrical charge carriers - electrons - in a semiconductor such as silicon. Now, however, physicists are trying to exploit the 'spin' of the electron rather than its charge to create a remarkable new generation of 'spintronic' devices which will be smaller, more versatile and more robust than those currently making up silicon chips and circuit elements. The potential market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. See Spintronics

All spintronic devices act according to the simple scheme: (1) information is stored (written) into spins as a particular spin orientation (up or down), (2) the spins, being attached to mobile electrons, carry the information along a wire, and (3) the information is read at a terminal. Spin orientation of conduction electrons survives for a relatively long time (nanoseconds, compared to tens of femtoseconds during which electron momentum decays), which makes spintronic devices particularly attractive for memory storage and magnetic sensors applications, and, potentially for quantum computing where electron spin would represent a bit (called qubit) of information. See Spintronics

Magnetoelectronics, Spin Electronics, and Spintronics are different names for the same thing: the use of electrons' spins (not just their electrical charge) in information circuits. See Magnetoelectronics, Spin Electronics, and Spintronics

http://www.nanotech-now.com/spintronics.htm

Spintronics

Spintronics (a neologism for "spin-based electronics"), also known as magnetoelectronics, is an emerging technology which exploits the quantum spin states of electrons as well as making use of their charge state. The electron spin itself is manifested as a two state magnetic energy system.

The discovery of giant magnetoresistance in 1988 by Albert Fert et al. and Peter Grünberg et al. independently is considered as the birth of spintronics.

Theory

Spintronics describes technology that makes use of the spin state of electrons. It can provide an extension to electronics.

Electrons exhibit the basic properties of spin, charge, and mass. When the intrinsic spin of an electron is measured, it is found in one of two spin states, which we denote as spin up and spin down. Since the Pauli Exclusion Principle dictates that the quantum-mechanical wave function of two paired fermions must be antisymmetric, no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state, implying that an entangled pair of electrons cannot have the same spin. There is generally a splitting of the spin-up and spin-down energy levels via the Zeeman effect, so electrons with their spins aligned with an external field are less energetic than electrons with their spins anti-aligned. Electrons absorb or emit photons (quanta of electromagnetic energy) to change valence orbits, and they lose spin coherence by interacting with mutually resonant photon frequencies, causing the electrons to spin flip by energy transfer, through mutual spin-orbit coupling, and through photon emission.

In order to make a spintronic device, the primary requirement is to have a system that can generate a current of spin polarized electrons, and a system that is sensitive to the spin polarization of the electrons. Most devices also have a unit in between that changes the current of electrons depending on the spin states.

The simplest method of generating a spin-polarised current is to inject the current through a ferromagnetic material. The most common application of this effect is a giant magnetoresistance (GMR) device. A typical GMR device consists of at least two layers of ferromagnetic materials separated by a spacer layer. When the two magnetization vectors of the ferromagnetic layers are aligned, then an electrical current will flow freely, whereas if the magnetization vectors are antiparallel then the resistance of the system is higher.

Two variants of GMR have been applied in devices, current-in-plane where the electric current flows parallel to the layers and current-perpendicular-to-the-plane where the electric current flows in a direction perpendicular to the layers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics

Hard-Drive Advance Wins the Nobel Prize

Findings transformed storage and could pave the way for new devices.

Prized Bits: This hard drive from IBM, like most hard drives today, makes use of an effect discovered by this year's winners of the Novel Prize for physics. Credit: IBM

This year's Nobel Prize in physics has been given to a pair of researchers who discovered a magnetic property that opened the way for today's fast and compact hard drives, making possible everything from iPods to the massive data centers that serve as the backbone of the Internet. The discovery has helped improve data storage density by at least an order of magnitude. And it is paving the way for several experimental technologies that could increase it even more.

Albert Fert, scientific director at Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS-Thales in France, and Peter Grünberg, recently retired as a research scientist at the Research Centre Jülich in Germany, independently discovered the property, which Fert called giant magnetoresistance (GMR), in 1988. GMR makes it possible to pack far more information onto a hard disk by significantly increasing the sensitivity of detectors used to read bits of information. Within 10 years of its discovery, hard drives based on the effect were commercialized by IBM.

Before GMR was discovered, hard drives depended on a phenomenon called magnetoresistance, which had been understood for well over 100 years. In magnetoresistance, a magnetic field alters the electrical resistance in a material, causing measurable changes in electrical current. In hard drives, this property was used to detect bits of information--regions on a disk that have magnetized in one of two directions. As the head passes over such a region, its magnetic field changes a current flowing in the head, registering a 1 or a 0. But the technology ran into problems as the density of memory increased and researchers developed ways to write ever smaller bits. "Conventional sensors were finding it harder and harder to detect the magnetic bits stored on a hard drive," says David Awschalom, a professor of physics at the University of California Santa Barbara. "The industry was facing this brick wall. How do you put more information on a disk and still read it?"

Fert's and Grünberg's discovery led to new sensors that show a giant change in electronic resistance when they encounter a magnetic field. This larger change made it possible to detect smaller bits, making it practical to cram far more of them onto a disk. "It's the reason that a number of years ago all of us saw a very strong increase in the storage density in our hard drives," Awschalom says. "It's hit the consumer in a very big way."

The giant-magnetoresistance effect depends on a quantum-mechanical property of electrons called spin, which has to do with the magnetic properties of a material. An electronic current includes electrons with two types of spin, designated "up" or "down." Similarly, magnetic materials can be magnetized in different directions, which can also be called up and down. The ease with which an electron can move through a magnetic material depends on its spin. If an electron's spin is up, it will move freely through an up-oriented magnet but will encounter resistance in a down magnet. The down-spin electron will behave just the opposite way.

Fert and Grünberg exploited this behavior by combining two layers of material, one magnetized up and one down. They then applied a magnetic field that magnetized both in the same direction and observed the effect this had on current running through the layers. They found that when both layers are oriented in the same direction, at least one type of electron can pass freely. But when they are oriented in opposite directions, both types of electrons encounter resistance, causing a large drop in current. Because the effect is large, the magnetic field from even a tiny bit creates a discernible signal, making it possible to detect smaller bits.

The discovery soon had the attention of researchers around the world because of its potential for improving hard drives. Stuart Parkin, a scientist at IBM Research, discovered that the effect could be achieved using much faster, cheaper methods than those used by Fert and Grünberg. Meanwhile, several other technologies had to be developed to take advantage of giant magnetoresistance, including techniques for writing smaller bits and for moving the read/write heads more precisely. A key discovery by researchers at IBM was a new configuration of magnetic layers that made it possible for the effect to be produced with small magnetic fields and used in the tiny read/write heads of hard drives.

The first disk drive based on GMR, a 16-gigabyte hard drive made by IBM, appeared in 1997. Over the next 10 years, the technology led to 1,000-gigabyte (one-terabyte) hard drives, says John Best, now the chief technologist at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose, CA. He led the group at IBM that developed the first read/write head technology based on GMR. (The most recent of these hard drives make use of a related effect called tunneling magnetoresistance; like GMR, it makes use of magnetic layers oriented in opposite directions, but it is even more sensitive.)

The GMR effect could be the key to several more generations of memory devices, Best says. As researchers develop novel ways of packing more bits onto a hard drive, leading to disks potentially 50 times as dense as those available today, GMR-related technology will continue to be used to detect these bits, he says. The property is also crucial for new types of devices, including magnetic random access memory (MRAM), which is nonvolatile like flash memory, but faster and more reliable. Another experimental technology called racetrack memory, which is now being developed by Parkin, uses a novel type of memory bit, but one that could still be read using a GMR-based device, he says. Racetrack memory could eventually combine the best features of hard drives, flash drives, and conventional random access memory, serving as a universal memory device. (See "A Better Memory Chip" and "IBM Attempts to Reinvent Memory.")

Indeed, in awarding the prize, the Nobel committee pointed to the wide-ranging importance of GMR in opening up the new science of spintronics, in which both the charge and spin of electrons is manipulated. The discovery, which the committee describes as one of the first payoffs of nanotechnology, has in turn now become "a driving force for new applications of nanotechnology."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19501/page2/

IBM's Faster, Denser Memory

Researchers led by Stuart Parkin are developing a new type of memory chip that combines the benefits of magnetic hard drives and flash.

Big Leap: Stuart Parkin of IBM, pictured here, is well known for his advances in the magnetic read head technology that are used in hard disk drives. Now he’s developing a new type of magnetic memory, called racetrack memory, that could be faster, more compact, and more rugged than hard disks. Credit: IBM

Multimedia • Click here for an explanation of how racetrack memory works.

Researchers at IBM have demonstrated the feasibility of an entirely new class of data storage, called racetrack memory, which promises to combine the data storage of a magnetic hard disk with the ruggedness and speed of Flash memory, at relatively low cost. In addition, racetrack memory wouldn't degrade over time as Flash does. While still in the early days of research, these benefits could make racetrack memory an attractive replacement for both hard disks and Flash memory, leading to ever smaller computers and extremely inexpensive memory for iPods and other portable devices that now rely on Flash.

In this week's issue of Science, the team, led by Stuart Parkin, a physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, described a way to read and write multiple bits of data to magnetic nanowires, an important step toward making a prototype. Previous work by the group illustrated that the fundamental concept of racetrack memory was feasible, but the researchers hadn't yet demonstrated the manipulation of multiple bits. "It's a milestone in developing a prototype," says Parkin.

Racetrack memory consists of an array of billions of nanowires on silicon; each nanowire is able to hold hundreds of bits of data. Because the nanowires are so small, racetrack memory has the potential to be many times more dense than Flash. Unlike Flash memory, in which bits are stored as electrical charges in a transistor, racetrack memory stores data as a series of distinct magnetic fields along the wire. Flash memory degrades over time as charges leak and memory cells wear out, but racetrack memory, which uses magnetic fields, doesn't have this problem. And compared to the hard disks used in laptops and PCs, which store data on a bulky, spinning platter, racetrack memory has no moving parts and can be built in silicon, making it more robust.

Data is encoded onto racetrack memory by changing the magnetic properties along the wire, creating a series of magnetic barriers--called domain walls--and gaps between. Just as electrical charge represents a bit in a Flash memory cell, the gaps between two domain walls represent bits in racetrack memory. To read and write data from the nanowire, the domain walls move along the tracks, single file, past where stationary read and write heads are positioned.

That is, at least in theory, how it would work. But before the current research, no one had shown that multiple domain walls--essentially, data--could move along a nanowire without being destroyed. In order to move the domain wall down the nanowire, Parkin uses principles from spintronics, which takes advantage of the quantum mechanical property of electrons, called spin. He injects a small electrical current into the nanowire. As a result, the electrons in the current become "polarized," so that their spins are uniformly oriented, and when they contact a domain wall, they transfer the orientation of their spin to the atoms in the wall. This hand-off changes the magnetic moment of the atoms in the domain wall, shifting it forward on the racetrack, and likewise shifts all the domain walls on the racetrack forward, explains Parkin.

Keeping Track: Vertically oriented nanowires (top left, middle) illustrate how electric current is used to slide tiny magnetic patterns around the nanowire “racetrack” where a device can read and write data. A device reads data from the stored pattern (top right) by measuring the magnetoresistance of the patterns. Writing data (the two images below the read head) can be done by applying an electrical current to a second nanowire at a right angle to the data-storing wire. It is possible to fabricate the nanowires in a vertical array (middle right) and horizontally (bottom two images). Credit: IBM

"This is the first time that someone has demonstrated that you can move two or three of these domain walls without upsetting them or causing them to interfere," Parkin says. Parkin notes that it could take four years before he has a racetrack memory prototype, and three more years to commercialize it.

The appeal of racetrack memory, says Igor Zutic, professor of physics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is that it can "unify the best properties of inexpensive, high-density storage of magnetic hard drives with high-speed operation of random-access memory in a single device, while avoiding their main shortfalls, such as speed and cost, respectively."

The next step, Parkin says, is to implement a device to read the bits of data. He suspects that this will be fairly straightforward, because he could use pre-existing technology. In 2004, Parkin developed the small magnetic device that reads data from magnetic disk drives, and these devices, called magnetic tunnel junctions, would be sensitive enough to read the tiny magnetic fields produced by the domain walls in the nanowires.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20553/?a=f