Slashdot Mirror
IBM Claims Spintronics Memory Breakthrough
CWmike writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld: "In a paper set to be published this week in the scientific journal Nature, IBM researchers are claiming a huge breakthrough in spintronics, a technology that could significantly boost capacity and lower power use of memory and storage devices. Spintronics, short for 'spin transport electronics,' uses the natural spin of electrons within a magnetic field in combination with a read/write head to lay down and read back bits of data on semiconductor material. By changing an electron's axis in an up or down orientation — all relative to the space in which it exists — physicists are able to have it represent bits of data. For example, an electron on an upward axis is a one; and an electron on a downward axis is a zero. Spintronics has long faced an intrinsic problem because electrons have only held an 'up or down' orientation for 100 picoseconds. A picosecond is one trillionth of a second [one thousandth of a nanosecond.] One hundred picoseconds is not enough time for a compute cycle, so transistors cannot complete a compute function and data storage is not persistent. In the study published in Nature, IBM Research and the Solid State Physics Laboratory at ETH Zurich announced they had found a way to synchronize electrons, which could extend their spin lifetime by 30 times to 1.1 nanoseconds, the time it takes for a 1 GHz processor to cycle."
That's some really, really dynamic RAM. Don't skip a refresh cycle.
I don't see any cone intersections in his text. Perhaps you meant ellipsis...
Put another way, if 100 slashdotters had to answer the question "pico = 10^x", does anybody really think we'd all get it right?
1 hectoslashdotter cannot be wrong!
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
I do. Indeed, I see four of them in your comment.
Queue the Metric/Imperial Wars:
So "Queue" is the metric equivalent of "Cue" ?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw