Missing files and phone numbers caused by computer crashes and power losses may soon become a thing of the past thanks to a team of ISU researchers.

Former ISU professors William Black and Marwan Hassoun, now employees of Xilinx Inc., and Bodhisattva Das, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, have received a patent for the newest variety of temporary memory, called MRAM, that continues to store data, even after sudden computer power loss.

“MRAM works differently from the ordinary RAM used for temporary storage,” Das said. “You still need power to store the information, but after the information is encoded, no additional energy is needed to maintain the data.”

That means if a computer with MRAM were to stop working suddenly, anything previously on the screen would reappear after a reboot.

The researchers’ primary commercial goal is to integrate this technology into palm pilots and cell phones where bulky hard drive storage is impractical.

“For example, your cell phone would have to have a battery to store a phone number,” Das said. “But the battery could die at any time and the number would still be in the phone’s memory when the battery is replaced if our technology was used.”

Students on campus have expressed an interest in MRAM for cell phones and personal organizers.

Many computer programs automatically save documents periodically for later retrieval if the computer shuts down, but there are practically no fail-safes for dead cell phone batteries.

Amanda Petersen, junior in microbiology, had to restart a 15-page lab report because of a computer crash. “[MRAM] would be helpful, but probably not needed that often,” Petersen said. “Yet when computers do crash, it’s always in the middle of some big project.”

Many other independent research teams have been working toward the same concept, but this patent outlines the most compact version. It has proven to be capable of many rewrites and readings without any damage to the information.

GM and Motorola have been researching MRAM and have taken particular notice of the ISU team’s patent, although this latest version may not become commercially viable, Das said.

“It’s a big leap from the research to the manufacturing of a product,” Das said. “MRAM works in the lab currently, but someone needs to see if it can work in the business world.”