Study Opens Route To Ultra-Low-Power Microchips (mit.edu) 41
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.
Toriod core memory anyone? (Score:3)
Sounds like an improvement on core memory..
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds like an improvement on core memory..
... in the same way that fractional-step UV photolithography sounds like an improvement on a hammer and chisel.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like an improvement on core memory..
... in the same way that fractional-step UV photolithography sounds like an improvement on a hammer and chisel.
Maybe, but it's basically a smaller version of the toroid core memory we knew and loved 40 years ago (and yes, I've actually used the stuff). I remember looking at it though a microscope trying to figure out how they actually built this stuff that small?
I'd call it roughly the same kind of advance we made from transistors to VLIS chip design.. Only without the speed increase. :)
Power consumption being lower, not requiring power to maintain it's memory, are all great, but if reading the data takes too muc
Will storage and memory eventually become one? (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Reading through the abstract something that struck me was the statement "with no degradation in magnetic properties after >2,000 cycles".
Just don't use it *before* 2,001 cycles, 'cause, man, it's all over the place.
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. If it were used for storage, it'd certainly cause a Space Oddity.
Good point (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
For a long time, the time it takes the transfer data from RAM to the CPU has been the bottleneck in performance. That is a large part of why so much of a CPU's die is devoted to cache - putting a ton of computational elements on the die is pointless if you can't keep them busy, and cache is also more straightforward to design. Switching out RAM for flash would cause a HUGE performance hit.
Beyond that, RAM can cycle continuously with no upper limit. Due to caches, most DRAM isn't going to cycle as frequen
Re: (Score:2)
That's why this new storage technique could bring the two together I was thinking - if it could reach the speed (and as someone else pointed out) the latency of RAM, and also has no cycle limit (that's what the >2000 cycles part is leading me to think might be achieved) and it can store data without power as can SSD, then perhaps you could use it for both purposes.
Not really enough detail in the summary to suggest this particular tech could or would be the one able to do so. But the combination of proper
Re: (Score:2)
That's why this new storage technique could bring the two together.
I doubt it's fast enough for even being used as disk space, at least compared to flash. Unless they have some novel way to read the magnetic fields, this kind of indirect sensing is pretty time consuming. The way you detect a magnetic field is by creating one of your own by passing a current past the cell you are trying to read. This requires you to carefully control the "read" pulse and watch for tiny variances in the rise and/or fall times. This kind of thing is slow, at least it's slower than just look
Everything old is new again (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone remember magnetic core memory?
Oh yes... I've used the stuff early in my career. It was part of the avionics package on a military fighter aircraft I was an engineer on. The amazing part was that stuff was nearly bullet proof, almost literally. I remember it was part of the flight data computer and provided a poor man's flight data recorder of sorts. A couple of times we had to read the contents from crashed aircraft to try and figure out what happened when the pilot was unfortunately unavailable to tell us what happened.
I still remem
Requires further development (Score:2)
"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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 fa
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Can retain their magnetic properties (Score:1)
For how long?
And how far away do fridge magnets need to stay?
Re: (Score:2)
For how long?
They tested for 2000 cycles, and saw no degradation at all. So it is almost certainly reliable enough for SSDs. It is not clear if it is reliable enough for RAM, which would have to be good for billions of cycles.
And how far away do fridge magnets need to stay?
The effect is based on the movement of hydrogen ions. A refrigerator magnet would not be strong enough to interfere. But you likely wouldn't want to leave a strong magnet sitting on top of your phone for long periods of time. Even more so if your phone is hot, perhaps sitting in a car parked in
Re: (Score:3)
For how long?
Geologic time (absent extreme temperatures or magnetic fields) wouldn't surprise me.
Seabed minerals have retained the magnetization that they fossilized when they cooled below their curie point, creating a geologic record of Earth's magnetic field reversals in the spreading seabed. (That's how we know that/when the Earth's field reversed from time to time.)
While this isn't the same structure, electron spins flipping in an environment conducive to them being stable is not something that tends
Hohoho MIT never stops making is laugh (Score:2)
I congratulate the MIT for reinventing the bicycle... well, magnetic tunnel junction. Beg for grants and investor money more
Re: (Score:2)
I congratulate the MIT for reinventing the bicycle... well, magnetic tunnel junction. Beg for grants and investor money more
There haven't been many inventions for decades (centuries?) that didn't reinvent some previous invention in some way that worked a little bit better. If that wasn't the case, there would be maybe one or two PHD graduates in each discipline, in the entire world every year.
Why was this a breakthrough again? (Score:1)
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...