Innovator Profiles-Stuart Parkin

Stuart S.P. Parkin gets around. In June, Parkin went from the University of Kyoto, where he gave an invited address on "spintronics"—the emerging field of detecting an electron's spin in memories and logic circuits—to a conference in Moscow where many of the world's leading magnetics researchers had gathered.

Parkin is no theoretician. He combines deep insights into magnetics with an engineer's ability to create the machinery needed to realize his innovations. While at IBM Corp.'s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., Parkin developed sputtering techniques that enabled the development of hard-disk drive heads based on the giant magnetoresistive (GMR) effect, which gave the computer industry a twentyfold boost in drive densities. In 1991, Parkin discovered that the GMR effect depended on controlling the tolerances of the spacer layer between two magnetic layers with opposite polarizations.

Grant Willson, who worked at the Almaden Research Center at the time, said Parkin's perseverance gave IBM a wide lead over its rivals, bringing the company billions in revenue from GMR-based storage.

Last year, Parkin came up with key innovations in the effort to develop magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) technology. Parkin's group, and a separate team in Japan, were the first to figure out that MRAM response times could be improved by applying magnesium oxide—rather than aluminum oxide—in the MRAM's tunneling layer.

With that record, Parkin was able to convince IBM's management to provide some $7 million in spintronics-related research funding to build a new deposition machine—not an easy task in today's corporate R&D environment.

If the machine works as planned, Parkin may be able to create spintronic devices that would increase storage densities by several orders of magnitude—yet again.