MIT Technology Review, emerging technologies for 2009

As of late it seems we have been busy writing non-stop about semiconductor startups. This of course is a good thing since it shows that even during these gloomy economic times innovation and startups are alive and well. Occasionally through it is interesting to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to see what technologies might be coming down the pipeline. In other words, rather than looking at what a particular startup is doing, look at some of the things that are currently happening in the research community. Lucky for us, MIT, in their latest issue of the Technology Review journal did some of the leg work in their special report titled “10 Emerging Technologies 2009.” The entire report is an interesting read, but from the electronics and computing point of view a few of the sections might be more interesting than others, including:

Racetrack Memory: Memory technology that uses U-shaped magnetic nanowires. Portions of the wires have different polarities which represent 1s and 0s. Spin current can be applied such that the magnetic pattern propagates along the wire, through a point at which it is read. According to the article, data can be written and read in a little less than a nanosecond, which is not quite SRAM speed, but very respectable nevertheless.

HashCache: A hash function algorithm that translates data into a shorter representation which at the same time is the address of the data on the hard disk, thus eliminating a lookup table that is usually needed to look up data associated with a hash key. The idea makes sense. What does not make sense is the comparison table for total cost of a comparable setup: 14 gigabytes of memory for a conventional setup can hardly account for a $2500 price difference, especially with today’s DRAM prices.

Liquid Battery: A battery that is completely composed of liquids. The electrodes consist of molten metals separated by a motel salt. The beauty of the design is that these liquid layers remain separated naturally because of the different densities of the materials. A very unique property of the battery is that when the battery charges or discharges, the electrolytes and electrodes change in volume. Commercialization of this technology is expected within the next five years.