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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
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.
With bits that small, there's plenty of room for parity bits.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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
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?
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.
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.
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're doing the same thing with 'traditional' electronics anyway. As things scale smaller and smaller, eventually the charge of a single electron will be the limiting factor within a bit, and even before that level is reached, fluctuations of several electrons could be large enough to cause things to "go awry" as you say.
The whole point of spintronics (or magnetoelectronics, it's less buzzword-trendy name) is to add an extra degree of freedom to electronics. Ie, instead of using components that switch on spin-independent electronic charge, one is now adding this extra component that can be switched/amplified/etc.
It's effectively opening up whole new doors, and spintronics represents the 2nd-rapidest movement of technology from lab to market (after the transistor, of course). The field is in its infancy right now, but has huge potential to revolutionize the types of electronic components that exist.
As you say, working on such nanoscale systems makes things really hard, and we're trying now to study and overcome these technical difficulties. But people are hopeful this will produce interesting devices, such as using the spin up/down eigenstates of the electron as the basis states for qubits in quantum computers, for example. Or many other quantum-dependent phenomena that are effectively averaged-out in standard electronics.
make world, not war
You don't need wikipedia. Spintronics is the same thing as electronics, except it deals with, um, spintrons.
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
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
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