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Magnetic Microchips
Mr_Ceebs writes, "Looking at the BBC today I find a new Magnetic rather than electronic chip type. The design can raise the number of chips per cm by a factor of about 1000, with the preliminary stages of the technology. For all devices this would mean the demise of the large battery pack. " H : This is a follow-on to this morning's story on moldable magnets.
This is SO cool! With this stuff you can turn your computer off, turn it back on and be right where you left off!
Ahh, but won't the shielding necessary to keep all those little cute magnetic fields away from, say, high-tension power cables and the like take away the weight advantage?
In the article they say they have a device that can fit 5,500 million transistors into a centimeter. I can understand 6-7 million, that seems almost commonplace now. But 5,500 million just boggles the mind. They referenced the days of carrying around heavy batteries are numbered. I agree, but with these kind of advancements the days of the laptops and the cell phones actually seem to be what's numbered. Very cool.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
How do magnetic transistors work? I'm familiar with how old-style [sic] FET and MOSFET stuff works, but I can't see applying the same kind of technology to a magnet.
hmm interesting, I wonder if they kind of ship would run cooler then their electronic counterparts? This sounds like the technology that is going to hold us over under we find out how to do quantum computing.
IS this magnetic switching of bit just as fast as traditional electronic chips, or does it impose latency. Last, and finally all I want it to run quake 3 arena on my laptop for 7 hours at 60 FPS, then Ill be happy
The article was interesting, but I'm somewhat skeptical. No mention of computation speed was mentioned. Even if the chips are one tenth the speed, they could still be made run faster through massive on-chip parralellism. Close to a thousand processors could be fit into the same space. However, that kind of parralellism would require radically redesigned bus systems and much more expensive RAM interleaving. Also, many applications can't be sufficiently optimized for multiprocessing. Of course, this is all under the completely arbitrary assumption that these chips will run slower. I can't wait to here more.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
That's sweet. Just don't put it next to your hard drive...
kwsNI
This is SO cool! With this stuff you can turn your computer off, turn it back on and be right where you left off!
Even better, when you're not using your computer, you can stick it to the 'fridge.
George
Well, segfault isn't really appropriate for Kindegarten...
If it's possible to make magnetic processing units it's also possible to make magnetic RAM. The miniaturized storage capacity of such a development would be incredible. Imagine being able to fit fifty gigs of ram in a 32mb DIMM.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Hehe Does this mean we will be able to fix our pcs to the refridgerator?
In Republican America phones tap you.
The days of carrying around heavy batteries for laptop computers and mobile phone are numbered
This is not entirely true, for mobile phones at least. The bulk of the power consumption is from the antenna. Your standby time could be increased greatly, but talk time will likely be uneffected. Thus, in order to talk for a reasonable length of time, batteries will probably stay the same size.
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
Did Taco get some kind of magnet based toy as a gift? Maybe one of those 'sculpt your own' things with lots of little metal pieces on a magnetic base (these are dangerous around computers because the pieces eventually seem to end up everywhere, on powered up motherboards, etc.) Or maybe Taco got one of those pens that you store in the stand up case and the pen floats, locked in a repulsive magnetic field.
With one of these devices all you have to do is stand in a dark room with your laptop on one side of your head and a piece of magnetic film on the other and no more need for MRI's.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Isn't this just a miniaturization of a short lived 1980's technology called bubble memory, whereby a set of wires would create a small magnetic zone called a bubble on a metallic substrate. As I recall, the bubble memory system suffered from high latency times since one actually has to form and hold a rather high magnetic field on a specific grid coordinate to either write or collapse a magnetic bubble. Also, th system as I remember was not able to hold its memory permanently. The bubbles required a refresh cycle every once in a while.
Looks like we might be one step closer to Hiro Protaganists Garagoyle wear in Snow Crash ! But seriously, I dont know if I like all this, what kind of protection can these new breed of magnetic processors from even minute changes in the electromagnetic fields the earth naturally has? Yes, I know computers today already have a bunch of magnets in em, but they are more well protected then from what I can imagine a "watch band" computer can have. Hell, even a normal magnet will lose its magnetism naturally over time. I'd really like some more information on this, if anyone has some please feel free to send me a URL. I'm sure theres alot of bugs to work out and I know this is in its infancy, I just like to think of some of the (hopefully) less obvious problems you might encounter. I know I'd hate to have my computer crash every time I go near an MRI scanner! Well, these are just the thoughts of a rambling, over tired man; so on that note - Good (insert your time of day here).
Judg3
----------------------------------
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
the unfortunate quote of the day goes to:
"The other big advantage is energy consumption. Electronic chips use up energy during operation, whereas a magnet does not."
Processing information but not using energy. I don't think so.
I don't think that the article is exactly clear on whether or not this technology is useful for building new kinds of very dense, low power memory chips (something like a very tiny bubble memory chip) or if they can use the "magnetic" transistors to build gates, etc..
This would make a lot of sense to me if these were memory elements. This would be astonishing if they had some new way of manipulating magnetic domains and turning them into basic boolean operators. (To tell the truth, I think the author of the news report isn't very clear on what the difference is.)
In illa quae ultra sunt
Carbon (and other atomic) NMR produces a pretty good image of the brain (or anything, except metal). Imagin applying these magnets to get better resolution on hospital NMR machines - they could probably see down to the cellular level to identify tumors, etc.
I know there already are a few solar laptop systems out there, but my understanding is that it needs to be a pretty sunny day. With higher powered systems (especially those with cellphone type broadcast equipment) it's a little iffy. If an entire system (RAM included) can be reduced to this level of power usage without the need for a fan, I think it's quite possible almost any portable system could run on solar. The disply technolgy I don't know about.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Nice to see what goes around, comes around. Core memory in a dip package. Magnetic bubble memory was a first attempt at this but it took too long to move the bubbles around the ramps. This looks more feasable and the heat dissipation problem is gone. Is there any real reason to have mobile mass storage when you can have high density static memory? If you remove the heat problem, there's no real limitation to using three dimensions for the layout. Just build the chip up in layers.
I remember that awhile ago, the MIT media lab was working on wearable computers that drew power from the electric field that the human body generates. Does anyone know if the magnetic chips that the article mentions would be capable of running similarly?
As other people have said with the magnetic chips, what about getting it near other magnetic interference? It would be kinda nice to be able to shut your computer off at any time and have it come back to the same state, although does that mean windows will crash once and stay that way? :)
:) )
One thing did bug me about this article though, which is the lack of many numbers. They gave the # of transistors they could fit into a certain space, but what about the speed, heat, and actual electricity usage (even rough estimates would be nice).
Oh well.. Something else to put in the pile of knowledge of stuff that might be cool a few years from now (can anyone say new PDA's?
Hrm loving these
Controllers for space/time capsules (see Doctor Who: Wargames)
Linux port for iron filings
Compass that doubles as a Quake 3 client
Levitating trains (aka: Bullet train) with SETI@Home and distributed.net clients
Finally, for the more serious-minded, I'll be interested to know if this is specific to ferro-magnetic objects. Superconductors are also magnetic, but in a completely different way.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
moe
As I understand things, magnetic gates will be *very* slow, compared to good old transistors. Of course, IANAMS (I am not a materials scientist). That assumes that these things work on a similar principle to core memory. Their claims on power consumption support this assumption.
That said, this would be perfect for things like space probes like Voyager. As I understand it, the space program is one of the last remaining manufacturers of core memory. In case you're too young to have seen core memory (I am--I once worked with a man that had his own computer museum), it consists of thousands of wires making a grid, with a little magnet at each intersection.
--Be human.
Just wondering... Aren't there people who say in a few years chipmakers will hit some kind of quantum wall where the transistors and wires on a chip will be so small the electrons will just jump all over? Will this technology simply make that point moot or did someone forget to check that part?
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
You know when you go to University and you look around and wonder who'll end up being the captains of industry, the Nobel prize winners and the people behind the next great innovation, or who'll be practicing their lines "Would you like fries with that?"? Well it's still a major shock when I read this story and recognized the name Dr Russell Cowburn - this guy was the person who showed me the ropes when I first went to Uni. All I can say is that if he makes a mint out of this, I wish him well! And given that Cambridge Uni generally tends towards reticence rather than early disclosure on these sort of news items, you can guarantee that this technique has seem some serious peer review already. That doesn't necessarily mean that scaling this technique up to marketable levels is easy, but it sounds like the science is well understood.
Just goes to show ... I really should studied harder in those lectures on condensed matter physics. :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
While reducing CPU power consumption is useful, we'll still need to have bulky batteries because the majority of power in a portable device is spent on peripherals, such as LCDs and wireless communication hardware. However, having increased horsepower and RAM capacity will help deal with computationally intensive algorithms involved in encryption (current PDAs take on the order of 6 seconds to verify an RSA signature) and handwriting recognition (a 110MHz ARM in a Newton 2000 had respectable HWR performance; we can only guess what a supercomputer with lots of RAM can do).
I think the big thing about magnetic anything is that it degrades over time as it demagnetizes, as far as I can see optical based media doesn't suffer from this. (Except for those deliberately degrading DVDs they came out with recently... but then they are deliberately designed to disintigrate.)
Magnetic mediums still seem to be good, short term solutions for storage. I just think too much stuff on magnetic storage is designed for the long term.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
With 5.500 million transisters, you could easily implement quake on the hardware.
Nowhere in the article does it say this chip can do any sort of processing. (RTFL!)
Researchers say that the chip stores data in the form of tiny magnetic fields
This sounds like it's merely the latest development in magnetic core memory. I had heard people were working on core memory on a chip a couple of years ago (the other Slashdot Effect: old stories presented as today's news?), so the idea itself is nothing new.
And nowhere in the article does it mention anything about the speed of the device. While I'm sure it's faster than a 15k RPM hard drive, I doubt it's fast enough to replace SRAM cache memory, or even PC100 SDRAM. Magnetic storage on a chip would be good competition for flash memory, though. Just imagine a SCSI device containing a board full of these chips.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"However, when the Earth's poles reverse, such technologies will cease to function properly."
I'm assuming by reverse you mean the direction of the magnetic field. I'm not familiar with with this, but why would it matter? Why would it be different than say, rotating your new magnetic chip 180 degrees?
Would this development make everything Transmeta did seem like a joke? I mean they cut down the power consumption by something like at most 6 times. Compared to the potential of cutting it down by a factor of a 1000, it's nothing. The cool thing is that the two developments are completely independent (and at different levels) so combining the two would be like running a faster algorithm on a faster processor and would result in power savings of 6000 times over current non-crusoe chips!
-- The Sheep --
This doesn't have anything at all to do with the Earth's magnetic field. All of the magnetic fields discussed here are microscopic and local. Global magnetic fields would have to increase by many orders of magnitude before they could have an effect on this technology. It is quite obvious that these chips would have to be shielded from external magnetic fileds, but just a little bit of non-ferromagnetic metal foil would be more than sufficient. A reversal in the Earth's field would have no effect at all, it can just barely be detected macroscopically. I doubt that any micron or smaller scale integrated circuit could even detect the field.
I think you're just trying to be a troll. I don't know why, but you can just be a troll elsewhere.
That's old hat these days. The latest joy in systems research is nanokernels for OPJS.
Charming
take a triptonica to subthunk
Sure, your hard drive will work, but those communication links will be very slow. Also, you'll probably be dying of cancer...
Like your burglar alarm has mounted on the door. Only on a much smaller scale.
This is SO cool! With this stuff you can turn your computer off, turn it back on and be right where you left off!
EROS does this. It looks very, VERY cool. Its GPL'd so I don't think anyone here will mind. Has anyone here tried it?
They didn't mention speed as compared to a transistor. But, if they can make memory fast enough for an MP3 player, that might be the killer app for this technology.
Let me dream, 5GB mp3 player that runs off a single AA battery for 2 or 3 months.
You;re column doesn't attemp to be funny, why should you. This clearly isn't really Marilyn. The magnetic poles have nothing to do with this chip. It;s not a compass!
Check out Scientific American (from last year). This stuff looks more and more interesting everyday.
For those of you who don't know what core memory is or how it works:
Core memory consisted of a number of ferrite cores strung at the intersections of wires arranged in a grid. The cores were like, little rings of material with magnetic properties.
To set a core to a 1 or a zero, half of the current needed would be sent down the "X" wire, and half would be sent down the "Y" wire - where the wires crossed (and where the core was), the magnetic polarity of the core would be set, because the full current necessary to set the polarity would then be present at the junction. If the polarity needed to be reversed, the voltage would be inverted on the wires to perform this. The polarity of the core determined whether the bit (which a core represented - 1 bit of information) was a 1 or a 0 in value.
Reading a core worked similar to writing the core, except in this case, a third wire was used. This wire was weaved through the cores in a diagonal fashion, started at one corner, and worked back ad forth through the cores to the opposite corner. The reason the wire was put on a diagonal, was to minimize the signal picked up - if it was on the same path as the X or Y wires, you couldn't use this wire to pick up the signal, because the signal would be that of the current used to flip the polarity...
Anyhow, this wire was called the "sense" wire. To see what a core's value was, the core was written to. If there existed a value in the core (the core was saturated and magnetized to some polarity), and the polarity of the written value was the same, nothing would appear on the sense wire, and so the data had the same value as what was being written. If the polarity of the written value was different, then the act of setting the value would cause a change in voltage to be picked up in the sense wire, in effect signaling that the value was opposite that of what was being written. Here is where a problem came in...
When reading a value, the value in the core is written to, and the writing to that core could cause the core to change value! This reading process was hence known as a destructive read, since the data could be changed. So, after a read, the data had to be re-written to the same core, so that it wouldn't change.
A fourth wire is also found in core memory - I can't remember what this wire wass called or what it was used for (was it a "gate" wire?) - I think it came later in core memory development, when they started making extremely tiny core systems (some of which can still be found on Ebay - man, these things are small).
BTW - I am not old enough either to "remember" core memory - I just have read enough about it, and have some really old computer textbooks and history books that explain all the concepts really well. I have been thinking about building my own small core memory system, accessing it through the parallel port or an ISA slot. I bought a whole mess of small 3-5 millimeter ferrite cores. Not small like the advanced systems were, but they don't need to be - since I will be hand threading these...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
okay, i'm figuring that i'm the only one posting that actually has experience in fabricating and measuring magnetic nanostructures so here goes:
the BBC article is typically crap. what happens is someone from cambridge or oxford needs PR so they call up the press and tell them how many transistors they can squeeze onto the head of a pin. in the end, there's really no science in the article and, for those astute readers out there, in this particular article they don't make much mention of how these things work, what material they are using, what temperature they've demonstrated these things at, etc.
Typically, these estimates on transistor density are made when the lab produces a prototype with the active elements within a certain area. by no means does this mean that they've constructed a 5.5 billion density device that works.
they don't tell you what the mechanism is-- tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) or spin-diffusion/accumulation ('Johnson spin transistors'), however the switching speeds are estimated to be much faster than conventional semiconductor devices (there's some argument for this in IEEE spectrum from about 5 yrs back that i can't remember).
reliability?
they have omitted mention of the gate mechanism here. how do they plan on switching these things individually? telepathy? if they are using EM fields generated by wires, then there is the inevitable heating to deal with. what material are they using? what's the curie temperature? how hot do they expect these things to get? hey wait! there's no size bar on that pretty picture of the magnets!?
blah blah blah.
BAD JOURNALISM from the BBC.
i may be a jerk about this, but i think everyone's getting a bit caught up in the hype without enough data and it's irritating as a scientist.
If you read the article in Science, it appears that the speed at which they are driving these memories is about 30Hz. That's right, thirty Hertz, no M or G or any other prefix.
Gracias, senor Taco.
Long signatures suck.
The EE Times has this related story. Also the Feb. issue of the IEEE Spectrum has a nice story on magnetoelectronic memory.
Hmm... a cluster running off of these things would be very, um, attractive.
:)
Sorry, had to say it
-Joe
-Joe
Isn't it quite easy to alter the magnetic direction of things? I know most computers are densitive to magnets, but wouldn't these super-small chips be even MORE damaged by magnetic fields? I don't know much about magnetics, I'm just thinking back to elementary school when you could rub a magnet upside a nail for 5 minutes and turn it magnetic one way and then rub it with the other pole and change its direction. As far as I understood it, little bits of the iron in the nail were being magnetized towards the north with each pass of the magnet. Well, with these chips theres nothing BUT little bits....
Esperandi
What do you mean "turn your computer off"? The article claims no power to operate the processor. So it could always be running...as long as you're running within the on-chip cache... [Yes, I'm sure there is a bit of misunderstanding shown in that article...]
hmm posibly with this technology we can
acutally have a real magnetic field effect
when storing the data from a game of life.
What heppens when the dots get realy close to each other? Do they spawn new magnegtic dots or die
off after a few generations?
Might make for an amusing project.
Whatcha see on the screen....
That'll make it easier to shoot you in the dark. Police may not always have a choice of good lighting when they shoot suspects.
Moderators, take note:
1)Read the moderation guidelines before moderating anything
Imagine being able to fit fifty gigs of ram in a 32mb DIMM.
I don't know about you, but in everyone else's universe, the most that a 32MB DIMM will hold is (wait for it....) 32MB! (that's why it's called a 32MB DIMM)
This reminds me of a guy who was a few bricks short of a load, and called his DB25 a "25-pin DB-9 connector"... LOL
I think it was said best on Futurama when referring to dark matter, "each pound of which weighs over 10,000 pounds."
This comment of yours seems rather atypical for the person whom you claim to be. Do you know the order of magnitude of the strength of the Earth's magnetic field? Do you know how long it takes for the Earth's poles to reverse?
...if the data is all zeros...
This technology would let you do that with any OS, though, without any overhead. It should also make the circuitry interfacing with the RAM simpler, since you no longer have to refresh the stuff.
Ok, so it was just a weird co-incidence... I guess I should have checked first. :-)
I only read the chapter summary when we covered NMR in chemistry class. I pass one exam and it goes to my head...
Still, I thought carbon's chemical shift was 20 times that of hydrogen.. I'd better go study now, thank you.
You need to use the area (not the diameter) of the atoms, so:
1.00E+16 Angstrom/cm^2
(2.26 Ang)^2 = 5.1 Ang^2 approximate area of an atom
1.96E+15 atoms/cm^2
5.50E+09 mag transistors/cm^2
3.56E05 atoms/mag transistor
This may still be too high, depending on the crystall structure and the orientation of the exposed surface, since some crystal structures and surfaces contain more "empty space" than others.
Actually for Silicon (100) surface:
~6.8E+14 atoms/cm^2
5.50E+09 mag transistors/cm^2
~1.23E+05 atoms/mag transistor
Uh, I think you mean TRANSMITTER, not antenna. Yes, transmitting uses about 1000 times more power than receiving, which is why talk time is much, much less than standby time. Remember, your cell phone is always receiving. Also, LCD backlighting uses a lot of power. In standby mode, your CPU probably would use more power than your receiver, but it seems like you should be able to slow down or turn off the CPU while you're in standby, and do a wake-up when the receiver decodes something addressed to you.
So, does anybody know what sort of security this kind of memory would afford? Would I be able to "read" your memory from out side of the system by putting some device within some distance of the magnetic memory and watching the magnetic fields? (ok, so they're real small and weak, but i'm sure some real sensitive equipment could be built) Seems like it could make Echelon's job a little easier ;)
.plan!! what plan?
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I sincerely hope it is the reporter and not the scientist/engineers that think this. In order to perform computation, energy is consumed. Thermodynamics says so. If you do not use up energy, you are not computing. Period.
Perhaps the reporter meant to say that it consumes a lot less energy during operation.
Free energy machine flames to /dev/null.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
This seems like an article that has many ifs and maybes but very little information. "Up to X times better" etc, but where's the guarantee that by the time they're released that they will even be equal to what we have by then?
That aside, I wonder how much energy it takes to switch these magnetic fields. And since magnetic fields I believe are infinitely reaching, how interference will affect the miniturisation of this stuff?
Also, will pregnant women not be allowed to use computers because of dangerous magnetic fields?!?
Anyway, it seems that this will be released in "several years", just about the same time as quantum computers and holographic storage!! What fun we'll have then! And we'll prolly have the tech to graft all this crap into our bodies, for those of us that like to be cut up.
Yeah... Wouldn't your cellular phone all off a sudden be very sensitive to electromagnetic fields..?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Actually, this is not quite right. Rolf Landauer and Charles Benett from IBM have shown that computation can be performed with as little energy as you desire, as long as it is done REVERSIBLY.
Erasing information (dumping bits into the rest of the universe) is what costs energy. It can be shown that all computation (in the Turing sense) can be done reversibly.
Now, in practice it is almost impossible to devise circuits that do not dissipate energy. This problem must be solved before quantum computers can be built, because quantum computers must be non-dissipative (and therefore reversible) to preserve quantum coherence.
-- Anonycous Moward.
I still think that's pretty good. Using only five-digit numbers of atoms for anything is pretty small. Interesting possibilities for future devices.
Most of us know by now that modern electronics are very suseptible to EMF interference & the military/nasa are spending the big bucks to protect thier goodies. It would seem to me that IC's using very week magnetic fields would VERY sensitive to EMF pulses. And if the military/nasa realize this, chances are they are not going to pay for the large portion of research, I seriously doubt you will see this technology in the marketplace anytime soon.
Someone said up above that these things switch at ~1 ns. So that would be 1GHz clock speed. Allow for a couple layers of gates, and you could still have RAM at 200MHz, fast enough for most stuff.
Over the weekend I looked up what the fourth wire was for...
It was called the inhibit wire - and was used in a core memory "cube". This wire was threaded through the cores in such a way, on each plane in a cube, so as to "inhibit" the writing of bits on cores on certain planes of the cube. If you think of the planes as being analogous to the planar structure of, say, the VGA Mode X (all you graphics coders know what I mean), each plane is a bit array, and a word is stored via multiple planes (each plane is a bit plane). Due to the way the planes were wired (in order to make reading/writing quicker, from what I could gather), all planes were read/written at once. When writing to a plane, you needed to inhibit the current to certain cores in a word, to write a 0 in that bit position within the word. You would do that with the inhibit wire, which basically carried a negative voltage of half the current to inhibit the writing at the cores being written.
One final interesting note - something most of you may only read here. In this book, which I referenced for the info on the inhibit wire (the book was a textbook called "Computer Principles"), a mention was made about a different type of core memory - in which the cores were not individual, but was continuous. To put it simply, the device was made up of a flat plate of the ferrous material, with the wires threaded through holes drilled in the material, rather than through individual cores. It was found that the material stored the magnetic charges in the regions around the wires, and that these regions wouldn't interract as long as they were kept sufficiently far enough apart. No new name was given for this memory - it was just another type of core memory.
One more note - many of you have probably heard of mecury delay lines - but have any of you heard of nickel delay lines? Apparently, nickel (and some other metals) deform lengthwise when subjected to an electrical current. This property, with proper sensors and amplifiers, allowed early computers to have a cheaper (and less poisonous) alternative to mercury delay line storage systems. I once saw this type of system in a TI adding machine from the sixties that I had taken apart when I was younger, though at the time I didn't know what it was (this thing was completely transistor logic based - with the exception of the display - which were vacumn tube pixie lamps!)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon