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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
other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account. Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account. Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account. Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal
other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account. Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account. Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account. Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal
Me gusto masturbar en la cocina. Mi perro está a menudo presente y goza del acontecimiento.
Espero que esto ayude.
Spintronics. Wow, how cool. Yawn.
When do we get flying cities?
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
Nothing to see here, folks. Next story?
"This will be a funtastic opportuntity for both companies to explore the snacktackular field of spintronics"
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.
America needs you!
- Criticism of George W. Bush
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Just some of the flagrant abuses of the First Ammendment by commie insurgents and Terroristshere in the United States.
SUPPORT THE CONSTITUTIONAL AMMENDMENT REVOKING THE RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH!
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Thankyou, and may God Bless America.
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?
And to think I thought the new media of America, applying maximum spin every issue was wasted on the majority Americans with fewer than 3 braincells. Now it can be self-sustaining in the technological domain, as well.
All this nerdyness is making me dizzy.
This one is before the other one.
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...
Nice try, though, troll.
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.
Sometimes brown stuff comes out of my butt. It really smells bad. Is this normal, or should I consult a physician?
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.
...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.
The Institute for Quantum Spintronics @ NERO has a wealth of information. I suggest that you take a look if you're not really familar with it or want a good explanation in layman's terms.
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
When I saw the headline, I really beleived it was a pun on The SCO Group and the missing MIT rocket scientists.
The SCO group seem to be the spin masters.
I fully expect the SCO stock to rise a couple of points on news of a SCOX bankruptcy.
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
...and design ciruits using both spin and conventional electrical currents?
Maybe we could call it... duotronics?
The REAL spintronics!
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.
That would explain the SPINtronics name.
Automatically generated left-wing hate spewage and lies. I guess that makes his life -1 Redundant and he can go kill himself with one of those guns the banks are allegedly handing over the counter without any background check. No, scratch that, I'd like him to find an actual gun (perhaps from his shooting collection, or better yet, a prop from one of his movies!) and blow his brains out.
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"
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.