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Study Opens Route To Ultra-Low-Power Microchips (mit.edu)
Freshly Exhumed writes: A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also overcome some of the inherent physical limitations that have been slowing progress in this area until now.
Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated that they can control the magnetic properties of a thin-film material simply by applying a small voltage. Changes in magnetic orientation made in this way remain in their new state without the need for any ongoing power, unlike today's standard memory chips, the team has found. The new finding is being reported today in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by Geoffrey Beach, a professor of materials science and engineering and co-director of the MIT Materials Research Laboratory; graduate student Aik Jun Tan; and eight others at MIT and Brookhaven.
As silicon microchips draw closer to fundamental physical limits that could cap their ability to continue increasing their capabilities while decreasing their power consumption, researchers have been exploring a variety of new technologies that might get around these limits. One of the promising alternatives is an approach called spintronics, which makes use of a property of electrons called spin, instead of their electrical charge. Because spintronic devices can retain their magnetic properties without the need for constant power, which silicon memory chips require, they need far less power to operate. They also generate far less heat -- another major limiting factor for today's devices.
Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated that they can control the magnetic properties of a thin-film material simply by applying a small voltage. Changes in magnetic orientation made in this way remain in their new state without the need for any ongoing power, unlike today's standard memory chips, the team has found. The new finding is being reported today in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by Geoffrey Beach, a professor of materials science and engineering and co-director of the MIT Materials Research Laboratory; graduate student Aik Jun Tan; and eight others at MIT and Brookhaven.
As silicon microchips draw closer to fundamental physical limits that could cap their ability to continue increasing their capabilities while decreasing their power consumption, researchers have been exploring a variety of new technologies that might get around these limits. One of the promising alternatives is an approach called spintronics, which makes use of a property of electrons called spin, instead of their electrical charge. Because spintronic devices can retain their magnetic properties without the need for constant power, which silicon memory chips require, they need far less power to operate. They also generate far less heat -- another major limiting factor for today's devices.
Sounds like an improvement on core memory..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Reading through the abstract something that struck me was the statement "with no degradation in magnetic properties after >2,000 cycles".
With the increase in speed of SSD's all the time, and advances like this that don't suffer degradation, it made me wonder if at some point there would be no need for separation of RAM and SSD, if storage were fast enough you could just use as much of it as you liked for system memory.
Looking around at some specs it seems like at this point RAM may be just 10x faster than the best SSD's around, probably less now. I'm sure there will always be even faster L1/L2 cache memory chips to speed things up, but just thinking of the system RAM we all have today - there has to be a point where the primary storage is fast enough to take on that role and gain greatly improved system memory as a result.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone remember magnetic core memory? You used to be able to turn off the machine, then turn it on a week later have have it still be in the same state. We've just greatly improved the density of magnetic cores. (Sharp also had patents on magnetic memory chips.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"The new devices, with their low power consumption and high switching speed, could eventually be especially useful for devices such mobile computing, Beach says, but the work is still at an early stage and will require further development."
So we don't yet know if it can replace existing hardware, but hopefully it will work out.
that's 3 orders of magnitude slower for the SSD.
That's a great point, didn't consider latency. Even there though I wonder if some new storage technique like the one from the article may be able to close that gap, since it is an entirely different technology... but as you say that's a huge gap. I was more heartened by the somewhat less than an order of magnitude in terms of transfer speed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For how long?
And how far away do fridge magnets need to stay?
Where do you even get gadolinium?
Mostly from China, but gadolinium is also mined in the US, Brazil, Sri Lanka, India, and Australia. It is co-produced along with other rare earths.
It is not particularly expensive, about 50 cents per gram, and a typical cell phone or computer based on this new tech would only use a few milligrams, costing less than a penny.
let me know when this shows up in a commercial product.
If you are not interested in learning about leading edge research, then why are you reading a nerd website?
more "research" that doesn't work outside the lab and goes nowhere.
We have made huge strides in computing power and efficiency, year after year, because of the efforts of the very researchers you so flippantly denigrate.
Go back to Facebook.
I congratulate the MIT for reinventing the bicycle... well, magnetic tunnel junction. Beg for grants and investor money more
all of those things you speak of are incremental improvements on existing technology.
No they aren't. SSDs are not an "incremental improvement" over HDDs. They are a fundamentally different technology. There have been similar fundamental shifts in networking, and circuit board fabrication. High-K semiconductors, fractional-step lithography, and Fin-FET are all still based on transistors, but they have added up to revolutionary improvements in performance.
i'm still waiting on all those cold fusion and 3d holographic storage breakthroughs from the 1990s.
Scientific research doesn't work that way. Of course there will false hopes and dead ends. But only an idiot would obsess on those failures, while ignoring the cell phone in his pocket that is only made possible by profound breakthroughs.
Had to look in TFA to figure out what was special about this. Looks like this paragraph...
"But spintronic technology suffers from its own limitations. One of the biggest missing ingredients has been a way to easily and rapidly control the magnetic properties of a material electrically, by applying a voltage. Many research groups around the world have been pursuing that challenge."
Wish that'd been in the summary of the article. I'd heard of spintronics years ago, so that isn't such a useful buzz word...