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."

Comments

Magnetics

[(54)T-Dub]

For those of us who have never heard of spintronics here is a quick summation from the article:

Designing electronics based on how electrons spin instead of how they transmit electrical charges could, in theory, lead to far smaller devices with much lower power requirements and fewer problems with heat buildup. Unlike standard electronics, which represent the ones and zeros of digital information by manipulating voltage and current, spintronics uses magnetic fields to manipulate electronic spin into one of two states called up and down.

This sounds like a great idea to me. It also seems to me that there has been a lot of talk about using magnetics in data transmision (not storage) for a long time without any real results. It seems very promising considering that a magnetic field moves at the speed of light once it's been created.

One final interesing quote from the artice:

One area of concentration will be exploration of Dr. Zhang's research on spin currents. He has reported theoretical support for the concept that spin states can flow from electron to electron just as a charge does, but without generating the resistance that causes energy to be lost every time a charge moves from one transistor to another over a short copper interconnect.

obligatory wikipedia...

[qrash]

Spintronics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics

Re:Honestly, folks.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Moore's Law applies to transistor density. Transistor density depends on the smallest line we can draw on a microchip. Storage media sizes depend on the smallest line we can draw on a platter.

Platter density and transistor density are more closely related than you might think.

General information on spintronics

[leeum]

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.

Not quite ...

[DarkMan]

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.

Re:Not News

[brarrr]

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.

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/spint ron/index.html