New Material for Spintronics Discovered
Cpt_Corelli writes "Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology have discovered a new material with properties suitable for creating spintronic devices at room temperature. Previously this was only believed to be available at very low temperatures. The material is a combination of zinc oxide and manganite. The breakthrough is the cover item of the October issue of Nature Materials. If this new material proves viable for production there is an enormous potential for smaller and faster processors. Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"
NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
things will get faster
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I, for one, welcome our new spintronic Overlords!
I don't get it. Could someone please explain this in plain English? Thanks.
The subatomic part of the atom would store the information, and the electron would act as the bus to carry information in and out of the nuclear subsystem
It's actually a disguised, mobile WoMD!
Why does this sound suspiciously like some washing machine technology gone totally mad?
Microsfot will only have to increase the size of the delay #define CONST_DELAY_TIME 10000000 // Old value = 1000 /*
* Very important in order to make sure
* our users won't get dizzy from the speed
*/
for(i=0;iCONST_DELAY_TIME;i++);
Dont just mail it - Maileet
SPINtronics...I thought it was a joke .
I wonder if teh electrons get as dizzy as I do
[post based on 6 hours of sleep in the last 72 hour period of time]
why did you get TROLL when i always fail!!
YOU FUCKING FAG, IF THIS COMMENT DOESN'T GET MODERATED FOR TROLLing i'LL KILL EVERYONE!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
FUCKING LAME FILTERS1
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
(+5 Troll guarantee)
In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.
.
Incredible, really. I could store the Library of Congress in the LCD pixels represented by this:
Several times, I suspect.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Diamond based, nano-molecuar, photonic, quantum computers with Spintronics also in a big bewulf cluster and runing Linux.
Does that make the people who discovered this Spin Doctors?
whacka whacka whacka
Step 1. Computers will operate at the speed of light in the future.
Step 2. Humans will not have to use computers any more.
Step 3. ????
Step 4. Computers will build robots moving at the speed of light.
Step 5. Robots will enslave the world.
Step 6. Robots will enslave the universe.
Step 7. Profit!
I read that the previous record -- from just a year or so back -- was -101c.
This is apparently huge, if the PR-blitz is to be believed.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Does posting a link to the Nature Materials abstract count as karma whoring, when there's maybe only three people here who would understand what it says? ;)
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Here we come, won't that be great. 10Mfps in Quake4D, milliseconds from start to crash in windows.
But still connected to a low bandwidth connection (2Mbps) to an unreliable network with high contention rates and collisions.
Fast processors ceased to become something to get excited about since about 1999, 90% of people don't need them, 8% need more memory instead, and the final 2% do nuclear and climate simulations, work in industrial modelling, or SFX and animation.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
That we have finally found the limits of Murphys law? If I understand the article, you can store data on subatomic particles with the electrons used as the cable to transmit the information out? So this means each atom stores an Individual bit? And that any computer that operates at a higher data density would be a Quantum computer?
Also that I can store 6*10^23 bits inside a few grams of silicon?
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
does that finding has something to do with a arm and a very complex processor found crushed in a automated factory ?
I, for one, welcome back our old socially inept geekish Overlords!
Gordon Moore heaves a sigh of relief.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Mr Amalfi we are ready for takeoff
Spin-Up!
Lets move this city to India, I hear theres pleny of work going there.
Oh I'm getting dizzy
Confused?
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
Wow #1: MR hard drives already use spintronics?!
Wow #2: MRAM = nonvolatile memory 50 times faster than DRAM?! AND 10 times denser?!
Wow #3: MRAM in production by 2005?!
Does this spell the end for our Dynamic(RAM) Duo? Tune in tomorrow, because it sounds like everything's going to change overnight!
Wowsers!
"This is not a sig." -- R.
It is sad that I first read the title as sphinctronics. It is even sadder that I immediately started of thinking of electronic devices plugged into your sphincter.
Power off before disconnecting connecting connector. Seen on a cash register
Md-doped means Manganese doped, not Manganite. Manganese is an element, Manganite is a mineral, MnO(OH).
"Finally, imagine a computer memory thousands of times denser and faster than today's memories. And nonvolatile, so it retains its contents when the power is off."
When reading this does the dying scene in Bladerunner come to mind?
There is no hard evidence that the quantity of electrons in one pixel would storage the Library of Congress.
Someone fell for the FUD.
But, the LOC is the standard unit for measuring unquantifiably huge amounts of storage since (a) no-one knows exactly how big a LOC is, so they cannot dispute your estimate, and (b) the LOC always gets larger, and thus the estimate of "I can fit N LOCs into that space", where N is an integer between 1 and 100, remains accurate despite the logrithmic nature of storage growth.
I for one have never been able to convert LOCs to bushels, and I have no intention of starting now!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Ahem. I meant Mn-doped.
At the moment (2:30 PM CET) Southern Sweden is without electricity due to a giant power failure. So either this discovery already starts showing its evil consequences, or the Slashdot effect now reaches further than just web sites...
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
"Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"
It'll have to join the queue, _behind_ optical computers and quantum computers, I'm still waiting for what they promised...
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
You spin me right round baby right round like an electron baby right round round round.......
DIE 80's DIE.
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
Core Memory was around a long time ago. It provided non-volatile memory for a computer.
Isn't this just a molecular version of this idea?
I hope by the time they make an actual product out of this, the paperless office will have become a reality. Otherwise, I'll have a big problem finding my PC on the desk.
Perhaps this is going to be the one that is going to change the bottleneck in the system from the slow memory to the newly slow processor. And the very slow HDD. And the very slow I/O.
Having made which cynical observation, I wonder what impact this could have on database client server? Keeping the database in memory? Multiway processors? It looks like the only people really able to make use of the technology are going to be at IBM, and possibly Sun.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
When this story broke recently, there was a rebuttal to this claim which I cannot locate at the moment.
Something regarding each additional bit of data requiring more and more precision to both record and detect, to the point where you quickly lose the ability to store anything more.
sorta like the goatse movie..
I remember reading an article on this technology about 15 years ago. The article said it would hold a few terabytes non-volitile in the size of a sugar-cube (2cm^2).
My immediate reaction was how would this affect programming and OS when the line between memory and storage is disolved. Not sure if the interface to CPU would be as fast as current memory, which means it would just be a storage mechanism.
If it could be used for primary memory, what happens to files and how they are viewed (logistically not physically). Would we need 'virtual' files on a RAM-disk or something more abstract?
Time will tell.....
-Steve
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
If I only had a dime for everything that promised to remake computing...
New material. Got that. But what makes it so special?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
All power TO the Swedish People, all shall fall under our new spinning mram.. or something...
The US, Finland, England, now Sweden. All within a few months. Perhaps others? Material for juicy conspiracy theories!
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
ENTER
I'm only guessing, but this material makes "spin" transistors possible, whereas previous room-temp applications has been in other areas.
I don't recall my IBM Deathstar storing information in the spin of an electron :-O
I thought he said something about sitetronics.com.
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
FYI, the web is very laggy in sweden right now and there a huge blackout in the suthern parts. Coincidence.. I think NOT!
Obviously, the guys who made the Kentucky Fried Movie were seriously prescient,
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
This article (from feb 2003) mentions that one of the major obstacles is making it work at room temperature which now has been achieved. Apparently this is a huge breakthrough.
'unfunny fool', not 'troll'. and this should be modded 'insightfull': even taken your premise at face value, the even bigger fool would be the one that waste his time responding to an unfunny fool ;-)
New material. Got that. But what makes it so special?
It's both a semi-conductor and have sought after magnetic properties. Is it possible that provious materials were one or the other, but never both?
[mod limit: 2]
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Just to be clear, they aren't the first to look at Mn-doped ZnO as a spintronic material - people have been working on this material since the 1990s. Theoretical work by researchers at Tohoku University in Japan and others predicted that Md-doped ZnO could work at room temperature. After which, Others started work investigating the properties, and trying to improve the fabrication of the material to reach ferromagentism at higher temperatures.
I'll kill myself if you kill yourself first! ;-)
Hey, it's a ones-in-a-lifetime deal!!
Aargh, I've done it again. The worst thing is, my job for the next three years is looking at Mn-doped semiconductors, and I can't even type the damn description properly!
I think thousand of gigs of non-volatile memory will be NOT enough for WindowsWhatever to fill out the entire memory. Gates memory
What they mean is that they have discovered ferromagnetic ordering in semiconductors at room temperature. Translation--"magnetic" behavior in semiconductors at room temperature. MRAM and hard drives all use ferromagnetic conductors or "Magnetic" metals
Cthulhu for president!
Bow down and worship my disruptive intrusion!!
pleeeeeease?!!!!
It uses less power, too. MRAM is going to revolutionize every aspect of computing... big-horsepower things like PCs, yes, but ESPECIALLY PDAs.
I can't wait.
+++ATH0
Am I the only one who clicked on the Swedish link and got a flashback to muppets?
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
The new material is said to keep it special abilities at temperatures up to 150 degrees C.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
. . . or composes their own music on their computer, the vast majority of it sucks.
But the fact that it allows anyone with the desire to get into it without a high "cost" of entry, that's a good thing. Used to be that everyone made their own music (no radio, no records), they didn't need a "professional" to do it for them. Yeah, not everyone was a Padrewski, or whatever, but they did it themselves, and they liked it, by gum. A little more of a do it yourself mentality wouldn't be a bad thing.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
Heh. Problem parsing the line - it's the new material that wasn't previously available at room temperatures, not the devices. ;)
-T
...we were already able to dope semiconductors with small mid-Atlantic states like Maryland. I figured we'd start with something like Hawaii.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"D" and "N" aren't near each other on my trusty QWERTY, and aren't even on the same finger/opposite hand.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
It means that in 5 years, Moore's Law will stall out. Industry giants like Intel will refuse to make the huge investment to bring spintronics and other technology to market. Moore's Law will only continue at a crawl, and it will become only a function of heat sink size and weight. Processors 10x faster will only be so because their HSF will be 10x bigger. Prepare for extremely heavy desktop towers that become hot to the touch because the case itself becomes the heat sink.
That is, like, so cool, on how you can spend 1 hour looking up info like that.
Cheers!
Alastair Campbell will want a spintronic device, it sounds perfect for his needs. For more on this, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/news/7oclocknews/fea tures/iraq_committee.shtml
That would be "in abstracto"...
At first glance, I misread that as reading "New Material for Sphincters Discovered".
The obvious comment, which I was (and obviously still am) morally compelled to make was: "Well it's about time! That manned mission to Uranus has been on the drawing board for decades!" or something to that effect.
Yes, well... As you were.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
This sounds like something out of a Japanese graphic novel.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
In the eternal struggle between hardware engineers trying to make everything faster, and software engineers trying to make everything slower, the hardware engineers have struck yet another grave blow.
Fortunately, I'm hard at work on a new O(n^2) sort algorithm:
1) Completely randomize list.
2) In order traversal looking for out-of-order entries. If one is found return to step 1.
It's no slower than bubble sort, but it eliminates those pesky "best cases".
I'm also planning an operating system that uses an XML-based executable format, and "network RAM" protocol that uses XSLT to access memory paged over an HTTP connection.
Admittedly, it's a big project. We are going to need lots of volunteers if we want to get there before Longhorn.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
This SciAm article describes three categories of ferromagnetic materials. The first two are ferromagnetic alloys (which are what make up MRAMs and other current ferromagnetic tech), and ferromagnetic semiconductors. This team has discovered the first room-temperature (or higher) ferromagnetic semiconducting material, hence opening the way for spin switching and computing.
I was in the Sun-terminal room atthe comp.sci department of Copenhagen University.
I had to get rid of some rogue perl process I was responsible for, so I wrote something like:
"kill -9 31337"
*tap* Moments later, (I'm talking half a second here) all power went.
If the swedes now can find out how to keep their powerplants up and running....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I'd further suggest that Md-doped would mean Mendelevium doped, not Mangenese doped... seeing as Md is mendelevium, not manganese.
If you really want to go that far, were is a fucking verb, not a subject/verb contraction.
Clearly the author has corrected theirself to indicate that indeed, Maryland was in fact too complex a proposition. The correct state for primative doping is Minnesota.
:-P
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
We only need that some one get the afinity gene and also to some one to discover the ZTT jump. The base for neural nanonics are here!!! By the way I'm a great fan of Peter Hamilton space opera "The Night's Down Trilogy", and I agree, we have enough power in our PC for years to come (you only need to convice your boss of that) the real achivement will be to make things smaller, realy smaller. Just my $2c. Nazghul
I dare you to prove you are a /. nerd.
Sometime reading Slashdot makes me feel like I am playing Alpha Centauri, but in real life. Where is my singularity drive?
"According to chaos theory, all spintronic computers will eventually run amok with the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth"
Hmm, maybe that would have been better for the articles on humanoid robots...