Researchers discover the key to faster computing is sound

If you hate waiting for your computer to load programs, maybe you ought to sing to it.

At least that’s what researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds are suggesting.

New research published in Applied Physics Letters has shown that certain types of sound waves can move data quickly, using minimal power.

The world’s 2.7 zettabytes (2.7 followed by 21 zeros) of data are mostly held on hard disk drives. Hard disk drives are magnetic disks that work like miniaturized record players, with the data read by sensors that scan over the disk’s surface as it spins. There are limits on how fast it can operate, though, due to all of the moving parts involved.

For computers to run faster, researchers have determined that they needed to create “solid-state” drives that eliminate the need for moving parts so that the data is the moving element, not the device on which it’s stored.

Flash-based solid-state disk drives have achieved this, and store information electrically rather than magnetically, but they also have limitations in lifespan and are unreliable and expensive.

Researchers are now working to create a magnetic solid-state drive that could overcome all of these problems. One solution being developed is ‘racetrack memory’, which uses tiny magnetic wires, each one hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, down which magnetic “bits” of data run like racing cars around a track.

Prior research on racetrack memory has revolved around using magnetic fields or electric currents to move the data bits down the wires, but these options create heat and reduce power efficiency, in turn limiting battery life and increase energy bills and CO2 emissions.

Dr Tom Hayward from the University of Sheffield and Professor John Cunningham from the University of Leeds have come up with a completely new solution: passing sound waves across the surface on which the wires are fixed. They found that the direction of data flow depends on the pitch of the sound generated.

You could say they “sang” to the data to move it.

The sound they used is in the form of surface acoustic waves . These are the same waves as the ones that emanate from an earthquake. Although already harnessed for use in electronics and other areas of engineering, this is the first time surface acoustic waves have been applied to a data storage system.

“The key advantage of surface acoustic waves in this application is their ability to travel up to several centimetres without decaying, which at the nano-scale is a huge distance. Because of this, we think a single sound wave could be used to “sing” to large numbers of nanowires simultaneously, enabling us to move a lot of data using very little power. We’re now aiming to create prototype devices in which this concept can be fully tested,” said Dr. Hayward, from Sheffield’s Faculty of Engineering.