ABSTRACT
While long-term information storage has been dominated by magnetic technologies such as hard drives and tape drives for the last 50 years, the time when magnetic core memories dominated random access memories (RAM) is long gone (for reviews on early memory technologies see, e.g., Refs. [1,2]). When static RAM (SRAM) and dynamic RAM (DRAM), both based on thin-¢lm semiconductor technology, were introduced in the 1970s, they rapidly overtook magnetic core memory thanks to their superiority in immediate miniaturization, continued scalability, and ever-decreasing production cost per memory bit (see, e.g., Ref. [3]). Attempts at developing alternative magnetic memory technologies to compete with semiconductor memories, such as thin-¢lm magnetic bubble memory, did not succeed commercially.
