18th Century Pigment to Revolutionize Chip Design?

Scarlet X writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered a possible nonvolatile magnetic semiconductor and are investigating its use for 'spintronics,' an emerging technology that is concerned with manipulating and controlling the charge, flow and magnetism of electrons. The possibilities for the material 'cobalt green,' a paint developed by American Revolution era artists, as a spintronics material is exciting. Should the magnetic properties of the paint at room-temperature prove able to reliably control the wild spinning of excited electrons in a processor, not only could the size of processors reduce substantially, but the constant limiting factor, how to keep things cool, could disappear."

Comments

Room temperature != operational temperature.

[Short Circuit]

While I'm sure spintronics circuits would have their own way of performing calculations, I can't imagine energy wouldn't be expended in the process.

If energy is expended, then the temperature of the component will rise. If the temperature rises, it'll be likely to require cooling. (Especially as more energy gets expended with designs capable of higher computation loads.)

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[business_kid]

I read that differently. The processor would stay much the same, but the net effect of the spintronics stuff would be to reduce (I thought) dissapation in existing circuits. Power calculations have the frequency component in them, so switching losses could theoretically be reduced greatly. If it allowed miniturisation, and it seems to offer promise there, the capacitive element of power consumption would also be reduced. All we need is a major cpu manufacturer to take a gamble on it and plug a few billion into research, hiring me :-)).

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[WindBourne]

Hummm. AsI am not a EE or physics, I am curious. In your statement, you imply that the simple use of electricty (i.e. work) generates heat. My understanding is that heat is not part of the work, but due to the inefficiencies of the process. The more efficient, the less heat. For example, a regular light bulb (fairly inefficient as it generates lots of heat) vs. the LED (very efficient and with little heat). Or is my physics off base?

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Yes, but suppose 1GHz of computation on a classic device produces 1W of waste and on a spintronic device produces 0.1W then you'll be able to build a processor that can run a lot faster with the same heat output.
Spintronics is just another tech that might be better than classic electronics. It might end up filling a niche or perhaps a larger part of what is currently done with electronics. But noone (except the people from marketing) is going to garantee that this will be the next revolution.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[xael]

You are correct; simply because energy is expended does not mean it's lost in the form of heat. The idea of this paint is that it's magnetic properties control the electrons and, in theory, stops them pumping into things. When they are stopped from bumping into things they won't lose energy - in much the same way that a super-conductor works.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[headkase]

I'm still waiting for my diamond processor that runs at a nice 300 Ghz. And it would probably be an eight core cpu by the time it graduates from lab to mass produced consumer item.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[UnHolier than ever]

When energy is used to do work (i.e. lighting a room), then yes, the heat generated is due to an inefficient process, but that doesn't mean that it is possible to have a 100% efficient process. Actually, the second (?) law of thermodynamics states that a 100% efficient process is only possible at absolute zero. On the other hand, a processor produces no work, i.e. there are no moving parts, it doesn't produce light, it doesn't make sound or an electric current. The only thing it does is move electrons around, i.e. changes its entropy. You need energy to do that, but it's not work: the total (useful) energy emitted by the processor is zero, and all energy used goes off as heat. There is a theoretical limit to the amount of energy needed to flip a bit, spintronic might approach that limit better than electronics, but wil not break it, and this energy will still be emitted as heat.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[aXis100]

Due to the design of semiconductor transistors, they have on (conducting - high amps, low volts) and off (non conducting - low amps, high volts) states. These discrete states have very low losses (power = volts x amps).

Unfortunately, during the transistion there are nanoseconds where it is in the partially conducting state. Both the current and voltage are at intermediate values, and the power dissipation rises. The more often they switch, the more often these losses occur, which is why CPU heat is dependant on the operating frequency.

Spintronics may use a fundamentally differnt signalling mechanism which doesnt involve these transition losses.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[packeteer]

It is possible to process information with absolutly 0 energy expended. If you use a certain transistor to do a calculation and then do the same calculation in reverse it requires 0 energy and produces 0 heat. It is a perfectly efficient process. This is called reversible logic.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/176/ibmrd17 06G.pdf

This idea is over 40 years old and is well understood science. This is not science fiction and many of the technical aspects of how to engineer a system like this have been worked out but obviously not all just yet.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[crgrace]

A processor does do significant work. For example, the electrons in the channels of the transistors move against some finite resistance, phonons are released as electrons fall from the conduction band into the valence band, etc. It only doesn't produce light because there is a momentum change (hence the phonon) when the electrons do so. In direct bandgap semiconductors, light is released, hence LEDs and semiconductor lasers. The reason there is heat in any processor is the fact that unless there is some resistance somewhere, the clock rate could be infinite since it would imply that any capacitance could be charged up in zero time.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[calidoscope]

(it's where the C in CMOS comes from: composite, meaning both P and N type)

C stands for complemtary - originally used to describe a PNP and NPN on the output of an amplifier (the output sections of logic devices are indeed amplifiers).

The problem is that, as the inputs are transitioning between high and low voltages, BOTH transistor networks are (partially) conductive. This allows current to flow directly from the high-voltage rail to the low-voltage rail, with minimal resistance.

Normally called contention or shoot-through.

Prior Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

It definitely brings a new twist to the term "Prior Art"!

In this case it wouldn't apply, but given the subject mateer it had to be said.

Cobalt green availability

[moorhens]

As a watercolour pigment, cobalt green is increasingly hard to find. Winsor&Newton no longer stock, nor DalerRowney. The only remaining major supplier seems to be Schminke. It's a really useful colour for making lively blacks, but the point of mentioning here is that these paintmakers all cite poison/health/product liability issues as reasons for its withdrawal. Best not kiss your circuit board any more than you should lick your brush tips.

Re:Cobalt green availability

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

If you know what materials are used in electronics, you wouldn't come near it with any part of your mounth. Only recently lead was banned from solder. And that's just one of the many unhealthy elements used in electronics. Most components are just toxic sand.

I guess ...

[surajbarkale]

Sven Rinman is spinning in his grave :)

Damn...

[pookemon]

but the constant limiting factor, how to keep things cool, could disappear

I guess I'll have to buy a heater...

Re:Can we now paint our own CPUs?

[LiquidCoooled]

You would need a pretty small brush to make them work fast enough to be really useful.
Someone like Chinese micro-painter Jin Yin Hua who has painted an image of a giant panda on a single human hair could really do it justice.

However for simpler curcuits it could be good to do.

I personally would prefer to put this ink into an inkjet printer and get better results.

Spintronics

[kf6auf]

So a bit about spintronics, or spin-based electronics: conventional semiconductor gates are prone to electron tunneling and require energy to maintain their state. Spintronics utilizes quantum mechanical effects in an effort to decrease the tunneling current through magnetoresistance and stores information in the polarization of a magnet so that it does not consume energy to do nothing more than remember from one nanosecond to the next.

This research has been going on for a long time - you may have heard of it here and it's likely going to take a while before we see it since it still needs to be perfected and then economical and make its way into industry. As far as I can tell by reading the UWNews article, all they did was discover that an old pigment can work. Not that it isn't cool, but it's not really likely to advance science significantly, especially because a previous article in PRL which was published in 2004 mentions this effect.

American Era artists?

[Intosi]

Shameless copy from wikipedia:

Cobalt green is a translucent green pigment made by mixing cobalt(II) oxide and zinc oxide and heating. It was invented by Swedish chemist Sven Rinmann in 1780. Although it is stable and can be safely mixed with other pigments, it is rarely used because it is a weak pigment for its cost.

While the timeframe is correct, the sentence in the posting (to me) suggests it's an american invention...

Sorry for the slightly off-topic, non-american-centric post. Now please continue enjoying your duplicates^H^H^H^H^Hexiting new stories and comments ;).

Re:American Era artists?

[Red Flayer]

Not only that, but it wasn't used as an art pigment until significantly later... so no, American painters during the Revolutionary era were NOT using it.

The first modern cobalt paints date from cobalt green (PG19), discovered around 1780 by the Swedishchemist Sven Rinmann, but not used as an artists' color until around 1835.

Article clearly by a non-tech

[Grab]

I love the line "Imagine that random access memory is accessible immediately". What a prat.

Lesson to all journalists: if you don't know enough to say anything on a subject, don't try to say anything yourself - just report what other people say and you'll be fine. Try to add your own tag-lines, and you'll end up saying something stupid like this.

Grab.

Cobalt green is ...

[deek]

Cobalt green is people!

Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for electronics. ;)

Maybe the pigment was left behind by ...

[master_p]

...them.

Can I have a hurrah for these?

Cobalt Green was not developed by artists

[Anonymous Coward]

but by chemists, Artists didnt even like it


The preparation of zinc oxide at the end of the eighteenth century made the development of cobalt green, also known as zinc green, possible.
The Swedish chemist, Rinmann is credited with developing a process for making a compound of cobalt and zinc in 1780 that he published with the Stockholm Academy of Sciences. Arthur Herbert Church published Rinmann's process in his book, The Chemistry of Paints and Painting. According to Church, cobalt green was made with the compounds of oxides of zinc and cobalt by mixing them "with an alkaline carbonate" and then exposing the mixture to strong heat. After washing the sediment that resulted, the pigment was ready to grind. The pigment was always bluish-green in spite of the ability to widely vary the proportion of zinc to cobalt oxides in production. The compound that is formed is chemically joined.

Cobalt green was a semi-transparent, moderately bright green. Most sources cited considered it to be absolutely permanent as most pigments produced at high temperatures are. However, tests made in 1847 and published in 1910 showed a browning of the color in full-strength and a fading of it when mixed with lead white. The colormaker, Blockx, added that the date of the tests bears certainty that the green was made by Rinmann's process,

Artists did not favor cobalt green although it could safely be mixed with all other pigments and was a fast drier in oil. The poor tinting strength and high cost of cobalt green kept it in limited use. Field called it, "chemically good and artistically bad"


history of cobalt green

The Joy of Spintronics

[Rob T Firefly]

We'll take our Cobalt Green, and a little Titanium White, and just paint some happy little resistors here in the corner.. they'll live right here right across the board from their little friends the capacitors beneath the happy clouds.

Goodnight Bob Ross, wherever you are!

Great but...

[Phraghg]

Can you overclock it?