From Magnetic Recording to Protein Memory

Sakhrat Khizroev
UC Riverside

Monday, April 6, 2009 at 1:00PM
54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: It is a historical time for the information storage industry. The roadmaps of leading companies are finally coming to an end. For the first time, the conventional technology is facing an inevitable end due to a fundamental limit to the laws of scaling. It is the superparamagnetic limit which recently forced the industry to abandon its long-lived mainstream technology of longitudinal magnetic recording in favor of so called perpendicular recording. Despite the fact that perpendicular recording offers merely a factor of three to five improvement in the data density, the multi-billion-dollar industry had no choice but to adopt this quite incremental solution. A number of technologies have been proposed to further defer the limit. The two most popular alternatives are patterned media and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Multilevel 3D magnetic recording is another alternative that relies on exploiting advantages of a third physical dimension to increase areal densities and rates. These magnetic alternatives promise to defer the superparamagnetic limit beyond 10 terabit/in2. However, because of too many open questions associated with any of the technologies, it may still be premature for a reliable forecast on how far and how fast any of these alternatives could take the industry. In other words, the industry still has no consensus on the technology to pursue in no further than three to five years from today. Nonetheless, the demand for higher data density of storage and memory devices is exponentially growing, especially with the emergence of the Internet, explosive growth of broadband communication, increasingly complex multi-media mobile devices, and the rapid expansion of on-demand databases serving multinational businesses. Sooner or later, the industry will have to adopt a more robust and long-lasting alternative. Protein-based recording is believed to be a technology that could answer some of the open questions and be extended to areal densities beyond 10 terabit/in2 and data rates above 2 Gigabit/sec. The concept of optical protein-based memory has been around since the early 70s. However, still no commercially available protein-based memory devices exist. In this colloquium, I will discuss the main challenges associated with practical implementation of such devices. Furthermore, I will talk about the feasibility of making the most of the truly unparalleled properties of photochromic proteins by realizing an optical data storage disk drive with unmatched features and particularly, record high data densities and rates.

Biography: Sakhrat Khizroev received a BS in Quantum Electronics and Applied Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), a MS in Physics from the University of Miami, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1992, 1994, and 1999, respectively. Before he joined the faculty at the department of Electrical Engineering of the University of California – Riverside, he spent over three years with the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Florida International University, Miami, Florida. In Miami, he founded and directed Center for Nanoscale Magnetic Devices supported by Motorola, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Before coming to the world of academia, he spent over three years as a Research Staff Member with Seagate Research and one year as a pre-doctoral intern with IBM Almaden Research Center. He has over 26 issued and 120 provisional patents with IBM, Seagate, CMU, FIU, and UCR. He has authored/co-authored over 90 refereed papers, 5 books and book chapters in the field of nanomagnetic devices for computing and medicine related applications. He served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology and a guest editor for Nanotechnology and IEEE Transactions on Magnetics.