Slashdot Mirror
Magnetic Transistor Could Cut Power Consumption and Make Chips Reprogrammable
ananyo writes "Transistors, the simple switches at the heart of all modern electronics, generally use a tiny voltage to toggle between 'on' and 'off.' The voltage approach is highly reliable and easy to miniaturize, but has its disadvantages. First, keeping the voltage on requires power, which drives up the energy consumption of the microchip. Second, transistors must be hard-wired into the chips and can't be reconfigured, which means computers need dedicated circuitry for all their functions. Now, researchers have made a type of transistor that can be switched with magnetism. The device could cut the power consumption of computers, cell phones and other electronics — and allow chips themselves to be 'reprogrammed' (abstract)."
Been so for 25 years. It's called FLASH memory.
They mean the transistors are programmable. If you can change the chip logic, you can get custom behaviours at top speed. Flash is for firmware, but doesn't change the chip itself. This stuff is awesome if it can be made to be as fast as a regular transistor. OTOH magnetism itself is a bit of a worry, as the chip could get wiped quite easily.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
It's a standard field effect transistor, except the gate can hold a magnetic charge on its own, with no voltage applied. You only need to apply a charge to change its state. It actually looks sort of like a flash cell, except as the gate of a transistor.
However, it's made with indium antimonide, which apparently doesn't work well with existing fabrication methods. And I have to wonder what the switching times on it would be - if it can handle the multi-gigahertz frequencies in modern processors.
The whole "reconfigurable" bit is journalist bullshit. Pay no attention to it.
EEPROMs as flash RAM or firmware is old, very old. But the idea of a processor being field reprogrammable *is* new. It's so new, nobody has anything that would benefit yet. Think of something like Cisco booting based off the startup config, then optimizing the processors based on the config. Port 2 shutdown? Divert the gates to process something else. Want to be able to turn anything on and off without any delays? Then consider dynamic memory allocations. Not dynamic storage, the way everyone thinks, but looking at whether there are 64 bit requirements, and if not, programming it as parallel 32-bit CPUs for extra speed, and if 64-bit is requiring, booting up in 64-bit mode. Got an idle encryption ASIC? Now you have another general processor.
You claim it is common, but has anyone ever released a CPU that changed dynamically? Rather than optimizing code for the CPU, optmize the CPU for the code. I see this being biggest in the area where ASICs are biggest, networking gear. Need more hardware encryption? Need more QoS profiles?
Learn to love Alaska
To keep a magnetic field going (small as it might be) you need to have a current flowing...
And that's why I have wires and batteries connected to all my fridge magnets...