A LITTLE OOMMF MAY HELP INCREASE COMPUTER MEMORY.Hard disk drive companies are scrambling to keep pace with their record 50-fold increase in storage capacity during the last eight years. Continuing this remarkable pace, and developing innovative technologies such as low-power magnetic non-volatile memory Refers to memory chips that hold their content without power being applied. It may refer to chips that are not changeable, such as ROMs and PROMs, or to chips that can be rewritten many times such as flash memory. (known as MRAM (Magnetic RAM) A non-volatile, random access memory technology that is designed to initially replace flash memory and, potentially, DRAM memory. MRAM uses magnetic, thin film elements on a silicon substrate that can be built on the same chip with the logic circuits. ), depends on accurate, predictable micromagnetic details. Scientists and engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology National Institute of Standards and Technology, governmental agency within the U.S. Dept. of Commerce with the mission of "working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards" in the national interest. compiled results from industrial and academic computer programs designed to predict how the tiny magnetic charges in these devices would behave. Unfortunately, the programs rarely agreed with each other, leaving industry without a reliable prediction mechanism. Accurate computer models can save a great deal of money in basic research and development costs, so NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. scientists and mathematicians teamed up with industry to create ways to verify the results of these computer programs. Hoping to add some "oomph" to micromagnetic research, the NIST team developed a computer program called OOMMF OOMMF Object Oriented MicroMagnetic Framework (ITL/NIST Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division project) OOMMF Object Oriented Micro Magnetic Framework . It stands for Object Oriented MicroMagnetic Framework. OOMMF's micromagnetic predictions can be compared with the predictions computed by other programs, allowing researchers to make more accurate models of many computer storage materials. The software can be downloaded at http://math.gov/oommf. NIST is currently working on a new three-dimensional version of the software that will enable researchers to model layered materials. |
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