What Is Bubble Memory?

The use of bubble memory became quite popular in the 1980s. It was a promising technology that promised a density comparable to that of hard disc drives and a performance comparable to that of core memory; nevertheless, it was swiftly relegated to the background as a result of significant developments in both hard disc drives and semiconductor memory chips. A very thin coating of magnetic material is used in bubble memory; this layer is what retains the many tiny magnetic bubbles or domains. An external magnetic field writes or reads these bubbles. The bubbles travel on parallel lines due to a magnetic field. This sort of non-volatile memory is still used today in some applications, although it is not very common anymore due to the fact that it is costly and has a limited capacity in comparison to other types of memory (it can hold only one bit per bubble). Bubbles may be compared to a person's memories in many ways. They are little, they arise and go in a flash, and it is next to impossible to maintain tabs on them. However, they are not only an insignificant component of the natural world; for example, data may be stored on them! In the 1970s, Bell Labs' Andrew Bobeck devised bubble memory, magnetic core memory, and twistor memory. Both of these studies were essentially the impetus for Bobeck to develop bubble memory. These patches could be shrunk down into tiny circles that Bobeck referred to as bubbles by making use of the orthoferrite and magnetic materials that are used for twistor memory. This was accomplished by storing data in patches, using a magnetic field to apply to the entire material, and then storing the data again. After that, these bubbles are carried from one edge to the next through "tracks," and a typical magnetic pickup is used to read them when they arrive at the other edge.