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Science

New Material for Spintronics Discovered 225

Posted by CmdrTaco from the science-is-cool dept.
Cpt_Corelli writes "Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology have discovered a new material with properties suitable for creating spintronic devices at room temperature. Previously this was only believed to be available at very low temperatures. The material is a combination of zinc oxide and manganite. The breakthrough is the cover item of the October issue of Nature Materials. If this new material proves viable for production there is an enormous potential for smaller and faster processors. Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"
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New Material for Spintronics Discovered More

New Material for Spintronics Discovered

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  • maharg's law (Score:3, Funny)

    by maharg ( 182366 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:11AM (#7032664) Homepage Journal
    things will get faster

  • What does this mean? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't get it. Could someone please explain this in plain English? Thanks.

    • Re:What does this mean? (Score:2, Informative)

      by grolaw ( 670747 )
      Short answer: new method of using physical properties of electrons to reduce the travel time lag imposed by c and faster data state identification with less power could result.

      Actually, it isn't that difficult. Our present systems use electrons (maximum speed is "c", or 186k/mi/sec) to carry or set data states (0,1). The electron has a few other properties that could be explored as a mechanism for data storage. This piece suggests that the "spin" state of an electron could become a viable mechanism (the

  • Oh no! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The subatomic part of the atom would store the information, and the electron would act as the bus to carry information in and out of the nuclear subsystem

    It's actually a disguised, mobile WoMD!

  • Spintronics? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rjch ( 544288 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:14AM (#7032681) Homepage
    Why does this sound suspiciously like some washing machine technology gone totally mad?
    • Actually, they were a Norwegian punk band. Influences included The Knack, The Romantics, Jonny and the the Charged Leptons and the little known NYC band Electric Dipole Moments.

      Some of their songs included "You Changed My Polarisation Asymmetrically" and the dance favorite "Boson and The Jets" which Elton John would later change slightly and catch a number one single.

      The lead singer died tragically and explosively when he met his antimatter self at CBGB OMFUG in NYC on April 1, 1982.
      • Dude! I remember seeing them at the Roxy in L.A. back in the day. Didn't they also do some sort of collaboration with Blondie, which gave us the song, "Fade Away and Radiate"?

  • Spin Doctors (Score:5, Informative)

    by heironymouscoward ( 683461 ) <heironymouscoward@yah3.14oo.com minus pi> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:16AM (#7032697) Journal
    In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.

    Incredible, really. I could store the Library of Congress in the LCD pixels represented by this: .

    Several times, I suspect.

    • Re:Spin Doctors (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dear Sir,
      we appreciate your effort in describing the storage capacity in units that the layman can understand. In the future please try to express the quantities in IT-friendly terms such as "Gigabyte", "Megahertz", or "bushel".
      Sincerely,
      Mr Blinky
      • But, the LOC is the standard unit for measuring unquantifiably huge amounts of storage since (a) no-one knows exactly how big a LOC is, so they cannot dispute your estimate, and (b) the LOC always gets larger, and thus the estimate of "I can fit N LOCs into that space", where N is an integer between 1 and 100, remains accurate despite the logrithmic nature of storage growth.

        I for one have never been able to convert LOCs to bushels, and I have no intention of starting now!
    • Incredible, really. I could store the Library of Congress in the LCD pixels represented by this: .

      More importantly, how much porn is that. And most important, when i view said porn will it be larger this: .

    • Re:Spin Doctors (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumFTL ( 197300 ) * on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @01:38PM (#7035336)
      Disclaimer: I'm just about done with my bachelors in Physics.

      In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.

      One of my physics professors [cornell.edu] here at Cornell does a lot of heavy spintronics research, and I can tell you that they are not even *CONSIDERING* using single electron spins to store classical information right now. Forget all the crazy quantum effects, and the fact that all the electrons nearby would interfere horrendously thorugh spin-spin interactions, thermal energy would screw that up in a jiffy. Think what happens to a magnet when it's heated up to the curie temperature (electrons are just tiny magnets). We don't even have a way to accurately measure the spin of one exact electron yet.

      As I understand it, the idea is actually pretty simple: instead of propagating electrical signals in a stream of electrons by altering their momentums (through the use of an EM field), you propagate a change in spin along the stream. Instead of speeding up or slowing down electrons, you're only flipping them up and down (you're actually flipping entire regions at that). Because of hte spin-spin coupling I mentioned before, this change in spin will propagate through the group of electrons *VERY* rapidly, much closer to the speed of light than a change in momentum would (by changing voltage, etc). So what we have is *MUCH* higher switching speeds with hardly any energy loss! So basically you have ultra-high speed chips that dissapate very little energy. Forget that watercooler in your laptop, you might not even need more than a tiny battery once spintronics becomes popular.

      Now, as with any technology spintronics has its set of challenges. The biggest one that I am aware of is the ability to inject spin properly when electrons are moving between different materials. Many crystaline structures can alter the spin state significantly on entry, thus destroying the signal (or at least reducing it). I am confident, however, that many of these problems can be solved, especially given that spintronics is provably much better than electronics for computing tasks. Just look at the enormous number of problems the semiconductor industry has already solved in the last 40 years. Add to that the hope that all of this could work at room temperature, and well, it's very exciting to say the least.

      So once again, we're not talking about individual electron spin. The only computing paradigms I'm aware of that use spin of individual particles are Quantum Computers (which do not behave the same algorithmically as classical computers) which are an entirely different story.

      Cheers,
      Justin

  • What we need now (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:16AM (#7032698)
    Diamond based, nano-molecuar, photonic, quantum computers with Spintronics also in a big bewulf cluster and runing Linux.

  • Bad joke of the day (Score:5, Funny)

    by xaoslaad ( 590527 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:17AM (#7032705)
    Does that make the people who discovered this Spin Doctors?

    whacka whacka whacka

  • Previous record. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:18AM (#7032710) Homepage Journal

    I read that the previous record -- from just a year or so back -- was -101c.

    This is apparently huge, if the PR-blitz is to be believed.

  • In abstractio (Score:5, Informative)

    by Seehund ( 86897 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:21AM (#7032725) Homepage Journal
    Does posting a link to the Nature Materials abstract [nature.com] count as karma whoring, when there's maybe only three people here who would understand what it says? ;)
    • Hmm, assuming you understood it and the person who modded you understood it, and knowing that I understood it, does that mean nobody else will?

      cool. I guess if he gets modded up anymore, then someone is telling porkies.

      Troc

      PS For the cockney-impaired: "porkies" from "porky pies" from "pork pies" i.e. lies.

      PPS A pork pie is a piece of fatty pink meat and some seasoning, wrapped in some jelly-like fat and some gray chewy pastry. Yes, it is edible. Just.
    • It seems it does...

  • 50Ghz processors... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:22AM (#7032729) Homepage

    Here we come, won't that be great. 10Mfps in Quake4D, milliseconds from start to crash in windows.

    But still connected to a low bandwidth connection (2Mbps) to an unreliable network with high contention rates and collisions.

    Fast processors ceased to become something to get excited about since about 1999, 90% of people don't need them, 8% need more memory instead, and the final 2% do nuclear and climate simulations, work in industrial modelling, or SFX and animation.

    • Re:50Ghz processors... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:00AM (#7032975) Journal
      work in industrial modelling, or SFX and animation.
      Don't forget, faster processing and faster hardware is what may allow everyone to do things with SFX and high-end animation. The same happened with video editing, CAD, real-time audio processing etc. etc; at one time these were things for high-end computers too expensive for the hobbyist, but these days everyone is doing them.

      Once we get the faster processors, we'll find uses for them.

      • Re:50Ghz processors... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by JanneM ( 7445 )
        Um, do I have to?

        I have a digital camera. I use it quite a bit. I _never_ edit the images, despite having the tools and ample computing power to do so. What I do is take a bunch of pictures, and throw away most of them. The rest I use in one way or another. Very few are actually saved semipermanently. And as far as I know, none in my circle of aquaintances edit their pictures either.

        The mac-toting people I know have all enthused over the video editing tools they have. None of them have ever actually used
        • With more processing power, maybe your camera will be able to save PNG's, instead of those crappy lossy JPG's, without taking 40s to save each shot, and without using huge amounts of available storage.

          Maybe it can start taking really high speed shots one after another, instead of struggling to hit 2FPS.

          Maybe it can do a bit more processing of the scene and avoid that odd over/underexposed image.

          Maybe it can use a more powerful autofocus algorithm and execute it faster.

          Maybe it can use a more powerful no

        • If we actually used all the technology we are surrounded with, we would have no time for things that were once considered important. For example, raising children.

          • For example, raising children.

            Proper technology wouldn't require time to use, or training to learn how to use properly, it would just take over the manual tasks we are loath to do.

            My house would clean itself, the laundry would do itself and put itself away the car would change its own oil and refuel itself, my body would maintain itself without requiring excersize, and I would be free to spend time raising my children.

            Technology should never cause me to do more work (unless its a trade off for something
      • . . . or composes their own music on their computer, the vast majority of it sucks.

        But the fact that it allows anyone with the desire to get into it without a high "cost" of entry, that's a good thing. Used to be that everyone made their own music (no radio, no records), they didn't need a "professional" to do it for them. Yeah, not everyone was a Padrewski, or whatever, but they did it themselves, and they liked it, by gum. A little more of a do it yourself mentality wouldn't be a bad thing.
      • When 50 GHz are reached, everything will be as slow as it was, because it would run on an interpreted programming language environment!!!

        (I hope not!!!)

    • Here we come, won't that be great. 10Mfps in Quake4D, milliseconds from start to crash in windows.

      Nonsense. What we get is redundancy, and we can actually use it. See, the thing with faster computers is, they allow a greater level of abstraction in programs, both on the programmer and the user side. This has unfortunately not yet happened, since too many programmers stubbornly stick to C and its likes.

      Granted, using high-level programming languages does not automatically make programs more stable, but it
      • I agree with your post, except for this part:

        This has unfortunately not yet happened, since too many programmers stubbornly stick to C and its likes.

        No, this is because computers are not fast enough to justify a leap to slower, more robust languages yet. We're just barely breaching the barrier of "My current computer is so fast that there is no need for a faster processor".

        It's very easy, however to add enough sluggishness into a system to drag it down below that magic threshhold, and suddenly it is no
        • We're just barely breaching the barrier of "My current computer is so fast that there is no need for a faster processor".

          Fair enough, but we're in my opinion close enough for most new applications to actually use something better than C :-)

          Operating system kernels, games and various libraries excepted, of course.
    • While it's true you can agrue that we don't "need" faster processors much in the same way that we don't need a better artificial heart when the ones we have kind of work now. Besides only like .5% of the people need them! I will no longer desire a faster machine when there is no wait time to do what I want to do. I can recall a time when I would never need more then my giant 20meg HD with my first 286. Often times wants outway the "needs"
    • Actually, acording to swedish media, this material will function both as cpu, and storage medium. Therefor there will be quite a big leap in computer "power" for all, not only those who crave fast cpu's. (sorry, bad english)
    • What you say is quite true, but what most fail to realize is that the 386 was more than fast enough for word processing and basic (non multimedia) websurfing.

      Even though there is not much instant gratification behind an increase in processor speed, it will certainly open the door to new innovation and things (although not completely necessary) that are quite exciting.

      Being able to go to a website, watch a movie trailer nearly in real time, and buy a ticket for it have all come about due to advances in sp
    • the final 2% do nuclear and climate simulations, work in industrial modelling, or SFX and animation

      Hey, don't forget us Computational Biologists!

  • does that finding... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dcordeiro ( 703625 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:23AM (#7032733)
    does that finding has something to do with a arm and a very complex processor found crushed in a automated factory ?

  • Moore's Law rescued again! (Score:4, Funny)

    by phil reed ( 626 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:24AM (#7032743) Homepage
    Gordon Moore heaves a sigh of relief.

  • Wowsers! (Score:2, Funny)

    by leery ( 416036 )
    Wow #1: MR hard drives already use spintronics?!

    Wow #2: MRAM = nonvolatile memory 50 times faster than DRAM?! AND 10 times denser?!

    Wow #3: MRAM in production by 2005?!

    Does this spell the end for our Dynamic(RAM) Duo? Tune in tomorrow, because it sounds like everything's going to change overnight!

    Wowsers!

  • A pedant writes... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hittite Creosote ( 535397 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:26AM (#7032751)
    Md-doped means Manganese doped, not Manganite. Manganese is an element, Manganite is a mineral, MnO(OH).

  • Slashdot effect on electricity?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by locknloll ( 638243 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:32AM (#7032786) Homepage
    At the moment (2:30 PM CET) Southern Sweden is without electricity due to a giant power failure. So either this discovery already starts showing its evil consequences, or the Slashdot effect now reaches further than just web sites...

  • It'll have to join the queue (Score:4, Funny)

    by You're All Wrong ( 573825 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:33AM (#7032791)
    "Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"

    It'll have to join the queue, _behind_ optical computers and quantum computers, I'm still waiting for what they promised...

    YAW.
  • You spin me right round baby right round like an electron baby right round round round.......

    DIE 80's DIE.

  • magentic memory is not a new idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jez_f ( 605776 ) <jeremy@jeremyfrench.co.uk> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:34AM (#7032798) Homepage
    Core Memory [wikipedia.org] was around a long time ago. It provided non-volatile memory for a computer.
    Isn't this just a molecular version of this idea?
    • Core memory is way, way, way, way different than spintronics. Core memory is closer to hard drives than spintronics. Core memory works with regular old magnets that align differently to store data. Very slow.

      Spintronics works by using spin-polarized currents flowing through special semiconductors that impede certain spin states. They have about as much in common with core memory as they do with refrigerator magnets.
  • I hope by the time they make an actual product out of this, the paperless office will have become a reality. Otherwise, I'll have a big problem finding my PC on the desk.

  • Remember ferromagnetic memory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by panurge ( 573432 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:36AM (#7032804)
    That was going to revolutionise memory a few years back? But didn't. Remember diamond semiconductors that were going to revolutionise processors, from around 1990? But didn't. Remember GMR heads that were going to revolutionise hard drives? Oops, they did. Didn't fix the slow random access data rate much, but changed the paradigm for backup devices.

    Perhaps this is going to be the one that is going to change the bottleneck in the system from the slow memory to the newly slow processor. And the very slow HDD. And the very slow I/O.

    Having made which cynical observation, I wonder what impact this could have on database client server? Keeping the database in memory? Multiway processors? It looks like the only people really able to make use of the technology are going to be at IBM, and possibly Sun.

    • Remember diamond semiconductors that were going to revolutionise processors, from around 1990?
      As I understand it, the problem has been creating diamond wafers big enough, and cheap enough to create chips. Recent press reports (Wired) [wired.com] have discussed a couple of American firms that have made some breakthrus. So give it another 10 years...
    • I thought that was "Bubble Memory"
  • I remember reading an article on this technology about 15 years ago. The article said it would hold a few terabytes non-volitile in the size of a sugar-cube (2cm^2).
    My immediate reaction was how would this affect programming and OS when the line between memory and storage is disolved. Not sure if the interface to CPU would be as fast as current memory, which means it would just be a storage mechanism.
    If it could be used for primary memory, what happens to files and how they are viewed (logistically no
    • I remember reading an article on this technology about 15 years ago. The article said it would hold a few terabytes non-volitile in the size of a sugar-cube

      Holographic memory. Problem is growing pure, uniform crystals in 1G. Access times were supposed to be on the order of 1ns. And no bus contention or wait states.

      If it could be used for primary memory, what happens to files and how they are viewed (logistically not physically). Would we need 'virtual' files on a RAM-disk or something more abstract?

  • "Not previously available"? Explain please! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:41AM (#7032838) Homepage
    According to the story, the universities have developed a new material for Spintronic devices, something not previously available at room temperatures. What? You mean like IBM's harddrives (from 1997), or the Infineon MRAM it hopes to being to market next year, both of which are mentioned in one of the linked stories. Surely both the harddrive and MRAM consist of "room temperature" devices, albeit most likely of a different material.

    New material. Got that. But what makes it so special?

    • Explanation... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cpt_Corelli ( 307594 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:55AM (#7032931)
      As another poster mentioned earlier, this type of material has been creted earlier, but had to be kept at a temperature below -101 deg Celsius to function. A more detailed look at this field is available here [sciam.com].

      This article (from feb 2003) mentions that one of the major obstacles is making it work at room temperature which now has been achieved. Apparently this is a huge breakthrough.

      • not really... ZnO is a II-VI semiconductor, while the other materials you're talking of are III-V conductors. there are many other room temp 'spintronic materials' such as ZnO:Co, TiO2:Co and so on. this is just another in a list, although promising. my lab has made room temp DMS of ZnO:Co (goes up to greater than 75C, and publication is in process... but any news is good news when you're in a relatively new field

    • New material. Got that. But what makes it so special?

      It's both a semi-conductor and have sought after magnetic properties. Is it possible that provious materials were one or the other, but never both?

      [mod limit: 2]

    • What they mean is that they have discovered ferromagnetic ordering in semiconductors at room temperature. Translation--"magnetic" behavior in semiconductors at room temperature. MRAM and hard drives all use ferromagnetic conductors or "Magnetic" metals
  • I thought he said something about sitetronics.com [sitetronics.com].
  • Obviously, the guys who made the Kentucky Fried Movie were seriously prescient,

  • Not new, improved (Score:4, Informative)

    by Hittite Creosote ( 535397 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:03AM (#7032999)
    Just to be clear, they aren't the first to look at Mn-doped ZnO as a spintronic material - people have been working on this material since the 1990s. Theoretical work [sciencemag.org] by researchers at Tohoku University in Japan and others predicted that Md-doped ZnO could work at room temperature. After which, Others [aip.org] started work investigating the properties, and trying to improve the fabrication of the material to reach ferromagentism at higher temperatures.
  • I think thousand of gigs of non-volatile memory will be NOT enough for WindowsWhatever to fill out the entire memory. Gates memory [urbanlegends.com]

  • Swedish (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Am I the only one who clicked on the Swedish link and got a flashback to muppets?

  • 150 degrees Celcius (Score:4, Informative)

    by thorgil ( 455385 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @10:31AM (#7033749) Homepage
    The new material is said to keep it special abilities at temperatures up to 150 degrees C.
    • The new material is said to keep it special abilities at temperatures up to 150 degrees C.

      So you're saying that this technology won't be of any use to AMD, right?

      Oww! Oww! I'm sorry! Stop hitting me!

  • Um, nope (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It means that in 5 years, Moore's Law will stall out. Industry giants like Intel will refuse to make the huge investment to bring spintronics and other technology to market. Moore's Law will only continue at a crawl, and it will become only a function of heat sink size and weight. Processors 10x faster will only be so because their HSF will be 10x bigger. Prepare for extremely heavy desktop towers that become hot to the touch because the case itself becomes the heat sink.

  • At first glance, I misread that as reading "New Material for Sphincters Discovered".

    The obvious comment, which I was (and obviously still am) morally compelled to make was: "Well it's about time! That manned mission to Uranus has been on the drawing board for decades!" or something to that effect.

    Yes, well... As you were.
  • This sounds like something out of a Japanese graphic novel.
  • In the eternal struggle between hardware engineers trying to make everything faster, and software engineers trying to make everything slower, the hardware engineers have struck yet another grave blow.

    Fortunately, I'm hard at work on a new O(n^2) sort algorithm:

    1) Completely randomize list.
    2) In order traversal looking for out-of-order entries. If one is found return to step 1.

    It's no slower than bubble sort, but it eliminates those pesky "best cases".

    I'm also planning an operating system that u

  • AC (Score:2)

    by crumbz ( 41803 )
    Sometime reading Slashdot makes me feel like I am playing Alpha Centauri, but in real life. Where is my singularity drive?

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