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Stanford, IBM Team To Explore Spintronics
saxylife writes "NYTimes and various other media are carrying a story on the latest venture between IBM and Stanford," which will concentrate on spintronics, in other words, controlling "the magnetic orientation of atoms to store data.
It's supposed to ease the pressure of hitting the barrier of Moore's law."
What does Moore's law have to do with spintronics?
One final interesing quote from the artice:
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
the last thing I want to do is invest in another technology based on magnetics. Solid state, non-magnetic media have fared far better for me in the long-term, and controlling magnetism on such a granular level only ups the chance that a few bits somewhere will go awry. The article even hints at it.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
FOX News has been using this technology for years to store the text that is then fed to their teleprompters and news scroller.
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.
Moore's Law has broke through previous barriers... why not this one? Something will come up in two decades that will shatter this "wall".
Take into consideration advances as such? Or is is just a die shrinking rule of thumb?
Since every electron has a pair somewhere in the universe whose spin will change when the electron in the computing device changes, how long will it be before someone playing DOOM XI unintentionally causes the navigation systems aboard the Narthon flagship to fail, leading to it inadvertantly straying into Drakoid space, setting off an interstellar conflict that eventually leads to the destruction of all life in our galaxy?
Apparently a mod doesn't understand the meaning of 'spin' as it relates to news...
For those (like myself) who have little idea about spintronics, Wikipedia has a general article that seemed to explain it to me quite well. Of course, I'm not a physicist so I have no idea whether or not it's accurate although I'm tempted to find out more from the referenced article. PhysicsWeb has more of the same. Apparently this will have far-reaching implications on RAM and cable bandwidth.
Electrons can tunnel across a gate: can variables like spin do the same thing? If so, that's another barrier.
I ope soon we will see a breakthru on media that will require no moving parts in the media, but still give the same I/O speed as current mechanical devices. I know from experience that at least half the time of a drive failure is due to mechanics. But much of the other half is still due to mechanics but appears to be a platter problem?
With all of the new advancedments in Computational Physics, when will we give up on Moore's law ? There are already several different technoligies set to break it into pieces.
Yet another article that confuses "Moore's law" as an actual physical law. Jouralists are often unfortunately out of their depth when it comes to Moore's law as it's a bit more complicated than using Word.
Moore's law is not a physical law whatsover and has no bearing on actual chip development or progress. It is merely a way to predict the miniaturisation of chips. It does not take into account manufacturing processes whatsover, and so there is no theoretical end to it when current chip miniturisation techniques reach their theoretical or actual fundamental physical limits.
Instead, Moore's law is a time scale that predicts microchip technological advancement and it certainly isn't a precise observation.
Every so often, somebody starts to claim that Moore's law is broken, or going to be broken, or can't hold any longer. It never happens and is usually just the PR department looking for an interesting angle on a mildly interesting discovery.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
What this sounds like is a form of bubble memory, a "miracle" technology that was going to take over the world back in the day.
There were actully commercial parts made. But somebody killed it with their idea to have battery cmos ram. Then eeprom and flash memory came along.
They could actually make this work better with the refined manufacturing processes we have today. So I would not discount it out of hand.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
...am glad to see that long-term research is dead. I mean, you hear about that so much here...
You know, you are on to something. Back in the day we had badgers, all over. You kids don't remember it, but they were the dominant animal. So one day a friend of mine says "hey, man, c'mon over and play some PONG, it's cool!"
Ah HA thinks I, we have a ping pong table in the basement and I am an *ace*, I smell $$$ coming my way with a little innocent pong hustling.
So, go over to his crib, there's he's got this thing connected to the TV, and I proceed to get my clock cleaned playing this "pong".
Climb out from his basement, go home, didn't notice it at first, but then, a few days later, we are sitting around yakking, when someone says "Hey! ain't had to peel any badgers off my leg all week, wazzup with that? " and we all go "ya, where's the badgers??"
SEE? It's REAL!
Moral of story is, if you see a badger, RUN LAK HELL, because a giant round ball is about to smash you!
The term "law" should only be applied to true laws, eg. thermodynamics, Newton's and Murphy's.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Although this may sound similar at the level of description given in the articles, don't let the journalists deep and impressive knowledge of this technology blind you.
The devices that are being talked about work in profoundly different ways to the old ST506 disks. Plus that fact that spintronics has been expanded to cover anyhting with magnets doesn't help clarification much.
For example, despite zdnets claims that IBM use GMR heads in their hard disks - that's not true, they are spin valves. These show a change in elecrical resistance in the prescence of a magnetic field - but no where near the magnitude of effect of a GMR device. That's fundementally different from the older method used in the read heads, which was to have a coil of wire, and detect the current induced in that coil.
If you can align the spin of electrons (do-able), then you can orient the spin, and thus have two independant channels within a single wire (horizontal and vertical, or whatever you want to call them). That's pretty novel.
Linus, meanwhile, pointed out that 100000% more of nothing is still nothing.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
but are expensive. Battery backed RAM disks.
The reason such things are expensive (and will likely remain so), is because with no moving parts, you have to have connectors to each bit of storage. That's a lot of interconnects requires, which takes up space, adding to the cost. Once you have a large enough array of bits, the routing of the data and address lines becomes the dominant factor in the construction.
I saw a presentation on spintronics given at WorldCon by Kevin Roche, who is one of the IBM researchers developing this stuff. He will be giving another presentation on it at -- of all places -- BayCon 2004.
I found his talk absolutely fascinating. He's basically created a "transistor" that allows through only electrons of a particular spin. Once you have an electric current composed of electrons spinning all the same way, you can do lots of unexpected things. One example: Light-emitting diodes emit polarized light! Even if you have only a cursory exposure to physics or chemistry, you'd probably enjoy his talk.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I'd put this one on a similar plane as that "15 minutes of fame thing"--it just spread and people just regurgitate it. Like some cancerous meme.
-I am an elective eunuch.
You don't need wikipedia. Spintronics is the same thing as electronics, except it deals with, um, spintrons.
IBM is doing research into more effective PR?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
But this technology works by altering an attribute of something that's always there, just like traditional magnetic storage.
Bubble memory works not by altering the bubbles, but by creating a pattern of bubbles. In a way it was like punched paper tape.
I'd say that Spin memory is more like acoustic delay lines than bubble mem.
...and design ciruits using both spin and conventional electrical currents?
Maybe we could call it... duotronics?
Not to be rude or intend to flame or anything, but spintronics has nothing to do with bubble memory. I'm doing a phd in spintronics under an advisor who focuses on magnetism, so i feel qualified in saying this. Bubble memory i don't know much about, other than it uses novel orientations and sizes of domains for magnetic recording.
t ron/index.html
spintronics, on the other hand, uses the charge and spin of electrons and holes in a similar method as electrons and holes are used in standard electronics. for example, the energy required to depopulate a channel in a transistor (turning it on or off) is far greater than the energy required to flip the spins of the charge carriers... so using that, you could have a smaller and lower energy transistor.
the limitation at the moment is in the materials, which is what we do... making them work at and above roomtemp for example.
if you be wanting to see a little more, check out our research page: http://depts.washington.edu/kkgroup/research/spin
to email me: take my
this is cool and all, and great for the field. it brings it to a bit higher profile, and throws more money at it. i'm doing a phd on spintronics, and have met a few of the people involved. unfortunately, i doubt i'll be transfering to stanford, and it will be years till i graduate and could consider working at ibm.
hopefully good things will come from this.
to email me: take my
The theory sounds a bit like the old bubble memory developed by IBM many moons ago..
Just taken to the next level...
Interesting stuff if they can pull it off...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It was probably just Milhouse.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
A device that made use of a relationship between electron spin, electromagnetism and gravity allowed any object to leave the Earth's surface.
We don't yet have a grand unified field theory or even know for certain how many dimensions there are in our universe. Imagine if researchers made a breakthrough like James Blish's spindizzy while working toward smaller electronics. Don't laugh. There are people working on this right now and not all of them are on the fringe.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
...have been limited to Guinness and Beefeater.
Its redundant because it just repeats what's in the article without adding any new information. You can also be dumped with a redundant mod by repeating something that's been said too many times in OTHER articles.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of redundant posts.
Bubble memory used magnetic domains and depended on electromagnets to move the domains around. The devices were non-volatile and rugged. The largest one made was about 4Mbit, and was the size of a credit card (TI or Intel, I think). Since the usual architecture was a shift register, its closest competitor was disk rather than RAM. They could be completely erased by a strong magnetic field.
Agreed. I did paint with a rather broad brush stroke. The only thing I lay claim to is that it's reminiscent of another magnetic technology, which was never able to overcome technical details and economy. Not that they are the same. Though they both seem to use thin films, just in different ways.
Not that it will be that way with spintronics, but it seems that the difficulties are always in the details.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Tiny nano-scale structures change state when they are hit by alpha particles. Consider experimental atom-wide transistors that switch on a single electron. When an alpha particle hits the gate of such a transistor, it flips state momentaily, causing a chain reaction of corrupted data.
Fault intolerance constrains the minimum size of the transistors. There is indeed a maximum speed at which computation can proceed because you cannot continuously shrink transistors in the hope of increasing the clock rates (while maintaining reasonble power). Spintronics offers no solution.
Life is contrained by 5 dimensions: x, y, z, time, and computational speed.
MRAM uses spintronics to store data. Its supposed to be very fast (dram speeds), dense, and not too expensive.
;)
Oh did I mention non-volatile ?
This isnt some fancy technology thats going to maybe apear in ten years.
There are preliminary datasheets out now right here.
I cant wait to change my hdd over to this stuff (welll, that may be years away
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Br J Surg. 1995 Oct;82(10):1321-6. Related Articles, Links
Electrically stimulated colonic reservoir for total anorectal reconstruction.
Hughes SF, Scott SM, Pilot MA, Williams NS.
Surgical Unit, Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, London, UK.
Total anorectal reconstruction after abdominoperineal excision of the rectum has failed to achieve perfect continence. Electrically stimulated reservoir evacuation in combination with an electrically stimulated gracilis neoanal sphincter might improve results. A J pouch was constructed in an isolated colonic loop of seven dogs. Bipolar square wave pulses were delivered via two intramural stainless steel electrode pairs at 10 Hz. Stimulation parameters were varied to achieve adequate contraction. Serosal strain gauges recorded spontaneous and stimulated pouch motility. Evacuation was quantified by a volume displacement technique and observed fluoroscopically. Recordings were performed for a median of 3 (range 1-11) months. At 10 Hz and 0.5 ms pulse width, stimulation was required for 2 min and at voltages of 15 V (n = 4), 18 V (n = 1) and 20 V (n = 2) to obtain a contraction of amplitude comparable to that of a spontaneous contraction. Suprathreshold stimulation invariably resulted in colonic pouch contraction. The mean(95 per cent confidence interval (c.i.)) stimulus-response latency was 25.5(1.9) s. The mean(95 per cent c.i.) intraluminal pressure generated during stimulation was 114.1(17.0) cmH2O and 64.6(12.0) cmH2O during spontaneous activity (P 0.001). In conclusion, electrical stimulation via intramural electrodes produced contraction generating sufficient intraluminal pressure to effect evacuation of a canine colonic pouch. This has potential for incorporation with an electrically stimulated neoanal sphincter in total anorectal reconstruction to improve evacuation and continence.
PMID: 7489153 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
This I believe deserves translation, right? :
I enjoy masturbating the cat in the kitchen. Its kinda hard so my dog helps.
I hope this helps.
Ok people above the equator...
:-) Yes its lame, but it is late Tuesday afternoon as I write and I really need to go home.
I live down under (in Australia). Given that spintronics is based on the concepts of up and down, would I need to install spintronic equipment inverted?
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
I though this was going to be another election year article. Instead it's about magnetic spin in atoms.
SPIN-A-TRON said from Washington today that everything was under control after a momentary glitch in the new Skynet command and control computers. It would be sending out T101 "claims adjusters" to process damage claims due to the malfunction...
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Once the force and creation of gravity is understood well a computer/storage medium that manipulates and measures gravitational forces could be used to store data.. Does anyone more learned in physics than I know if gravitational wave propogation is limited to speed of light? -gft
cragen
ps. Lots of great ideas go pfft for reasons that were once thought not to be a problem -- like the hovercrafts that were once predicted to cause roads to be obsolete. Noise, cost, etc., ended that little dream.