A team of Spanish and French scientists have finally found a way of reading and writing magnetic memory without using magnetic fields and coils of wire. Instead of using a magnetic “head” to read and write ever-shrinking domains on hard drive platters and tapes, this new approach can read and write magnetic storage using standard electrical circuits. Most importantly, though, this new kind of magnetic storage looks like it could be constructed using standard computer chip processes.

The way these magnetic bits work is ingenious: basically, there’s a base layer of platinum, a top layer of aluminium oxide, and a one-nanometer layer of cobalt sandwiched in between. As electrons pass through the cobalt, due to relativistic effects, they twist their magnetism, which can then be measured as a binary 0 or 1. By applying a slightly stronger current, the magnetism of the cobalt can be reversed. In other words, it acts very like standard DRAM, but with the data being permanently stored on that little piece of cobalt. Significantly, this process uses a “hard” magnetic layer that can be miniaturized to just a few nanometers while not losing its magnetic properties, which means there should be very few limitations on the density of future MRAM chips.

For now the scientists have managed to create a magnetic bit that’s 200 square nanometers or 0.2 micron — considerably larger than the transistors found in DRAM — but with a read/write time of around 10 nanoseconds, which is on par with modern volatile memory. The scientists are confident that their MRAM can shrunk and made faster — and if these magnetic bits can be made using lithographic processes, it’s safe to assume that memory manufacturers like Samsung and Crucial will soon be licensing the technology to help ready it for mass consumption.

The implications of this technology are monumentally vast. Current DRAM, as you know, is volatile and needs to be “refreshed” every few milliseconds — while with magnetic RAM, or MRAM, data could be stored indefinitely, like a hard drive or tape, and more efficiently power-wise. MRAM also allows for instant-on computers that don’t need to wait for a hard drive to spin up, and in the long run it might be an alternative to current solid-state NAND memory drives, or phase-change memory, which is a lot more mature than magnetic RAM.

Read more at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology