Licensing opportunity
The Swiss public research institution Empa, part of the ETH system, has developed a secure magnetic multilayer data storage system. The technology, which will prevent unauthorised access to data, is now available for licensing.
Empa’s advanced thin film magnetic storage system (aMSS) consists of one layer of ferromagnetic material, used in conventional storage media, which acts as a transport layer for reading and writing. The second layer, this time of anti-ferromagnetic material, is used to store data securely.
The multilayered nature of this system means that data are not stored in the ferromagnetic material (which any reading device can read), but in the anti-ferromagnetic material, which only very high sensitivity measurement devices such as magnetic force microscopes can decipher.
Once the data is transferred to the anti-ferromagnetic layer, the data content of the ferromagnetic layer can be wiped, preventing unauthorised access to the data, or damage – in conventional storage systems data can be lost or corrupted when the ferromagnetic layer is exposed to strong magnetic fields.
The multilayer storage system’s morphology, crystallinity and chemical composition, as well as the systems required to write, read, delete and re-write, are protected by a PCT patent.
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