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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."
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.
OK, now I know this can be painful. Try following the link in the story above. I'm not going to actually include a copy since the original one works so well. (HINT: it the link with the words 'Moore's law' in it) Next lesson, finding one's ass with both hands
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...
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.
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?
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"
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
You don't need wikipedia. Spintronics is the same thing as electronics, except it deals with, um, spintrons.
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.
I thought Microsoft and W had already perfected Spintronics.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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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
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.
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.