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?"

Comments

Spintronics?

[rjch]

Why does this sound suspiciously like some washing machine technology gone totally mad?

Spin Doctors

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Re:Spin Doctors

[QuantumFTL]

Disclaimer: I'm just about done with my bachelors in Physics.

In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.

One of my physics professors here at Cornell does a lot of heavy spintronics research, and I can tell you that they are not even *CONSIDERING* using single electron spins to store classical information right now. Forget all the crazy quantum effects, and the fact that all the electrons nearby would interfere horrendously thorugh spin-spin interactions, thermal energy would screw that up in a jiffy. Think what happens to a magnet when it's heated up to the curie temperature (electrons are just tiny magnets). We don't even have a way to accurately measure the spin of one exact electron yet.

As I understand it, the idea is actually pretty simple: instead of propagating electrical signals in a stream of electrons by altering their momentums (through the use of an EM field), you propagate a change in spin along the stream. Instead of speeding up or slowing down electrons, you're only flipping them up and down (you're actually flipping entire regions at that). Because of hte spin-spin coupling I mentioned before, this change in spin will propagate through the group of electrons *VERY* rapidly, much closer to the speed of light than a change in momentum would (by changing voltage, etc). So what we have is *MUCH* higher switching speeds with hardly any energy loss! So basically you have ultra-high speed chips that dissapate very little energy. Forget that watercooler in your laptop, you might not even need more than a tiny battery once spintronics becomes popular.

Now, as with any technology spintronics has its set of challenges. The biggest one that I am aware of is the ability to inject spin properly when electrons are moving between different materials. Many crystaline structures can alter the spin state significantly on entry, thus destroying the signal (or at least reducing it). I am confident, however, that many of these problems can be solved, especially given that spintronics is provably much better than electronics for computing tasks. Just look at the enormous number of problems the semiconductor industry has already solved in the last 40 years. Add to that the hope that all of this could work at room temperature, and well, it's very exciting to say the least.

So once again, we're not talking about individual electron spin. The only computing paradigms I'm aware of that use spin of individual particles are Quantum Computers (which do not behave the same algorithmically as classical computers) which are an entirely different story.

Cheers,
Justin

Bad joke of the day

[xaoslaad]

Does that make the people who discovered this Spin Doctors?

whacka whacka whacka

Previous record.

[eddy]

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.

In abstractio

[Seehund]

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? ;)

50Ghz processors...

[MosesJones]

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.

Re:50Ghz processors...

[JaredOfEuropa]

work in industrial modelling, or SFX and animation.

Don't forget, faster processing and faster hardware is what may allow everyone to do things with SFX and high-end animation. The same happened with video editing, CAD, real-time audio processing etc. etc; at one time these were things for high-end computers too expensive for the hobbyist, but these days everyone is doing them.

Once we get the faster processors, we'll find uses for them.

Moore's Law rescued again!

[phil reed]

Gordon Moore heaves a sigh of relief.

A pedant writes...

[Hittite Creosote]

Md-doped means Manganese doped, not Manganite. Manganese is an element, Manganite is a mineral, MnO(OH).

Units of Measurement

[heironymouscoward]

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!

Re:So this means....

[MoP030]

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.

Slashdot effect on electricity??

[locknloll]

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...

It'll have to join the queue

[You're All Wrong]

"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.

Remember ferromagnetic memory

[panurge]

That was going to revolutionise memory a few years back? But didn't. Remember diamond semiconductors that were going to revolutionise processors, from around 1990? But didn't. Remember GMR heads that were going to revolutionise hard drives? Oops, they did. Didn't fix the slow random access data rate much, but changed the paradigm for backup devices.

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.

Re:MOD POST AS "SPECULATIVE"

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Explanation...

[Cpt_Corelli]

As another poster mentioned earlier, this type of material has been creted earlier, but had to be kept at a temperature below -101 deg Celsius to function. A more detailed look at this field is available here.

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.

150 degrees Celcius

[thorgil]

The new material is said to keep it special abilities at temperatures up to 150 degrees C.