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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?"
things will get faster
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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?
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.
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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
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
does that finding has something to do with a arm and a very complex processor found crushed in a automated factory ?
SLAP!!!
At least choose a fresh quote, how about... "Professor, without knowing precisely what spintronics is / Reading TFA, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?" Professor: "Yes I would, Kent.
Extended Warranty? How can I lose!
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."
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.
Md-doped means Manganese doped, not Manganite. Manganese is an element, Manganite is a mineral, MnO(OH).
Short answer: new method of using physical properties of electrons to reduce the travel time lag imposed by c and faster data state identification with less power could result.
Actually, it isn't that difficult. Our present systems use electrons (maximum speed is "c", or 186k/mi/sec) to carry or set data states (0,1). The electron has a few other properties that could be explored as a mechanism for data storage. This piece suggests that the "spin" state of an electron could become a viable mechanism (the system could work in less than super cold environments) for creating, reading and writing data states.
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!
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Ahem. I meant Mn-doped.
No, it means when the benefits of spintronics have been exploited research will proceed to store information in quarks and whatever lies beneath, data transfer will be instantaneous through some weird particle entanglement. And someone will say "6*10^23 bits inside a few grams of silicon will be enough for everyone", and few years later he will be laughed at.
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
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.
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.
Please read the comment on the nature of the LOC unit. Thank you.
By the way, the number of electrons in a gram of phosphorous is about 2e22. Assuming 1 gram of the stuff on an monitor, and a 1600x1200 resolution, that's about 1e16 electrons per pixel, and assuming 1 bit per electron (somewhat beyond the state of today's spintronics, but not unimaginable), that's 1,250,000 Gb of data.
Enough for a few LOCs, I believe.
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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.
New material. Got that. But what makes it so special?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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.
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?
The new material is said to keep it special abilities at temperatures up to 150 degrees C.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
It's a pity Mendeleevium has such a short half-life, or you could try the experiment and see if it works even better than Manganese.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
. . . 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.)
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.
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
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.