Spintronic circuits built in Britain
Thursday, 23 February, 2006
Researchers in Britain have produced digital spintronic circuits that use the direction of magnetism to represent ones and zeros.
Prof Russell Cowburn of Imperial College, Durham University and the University of Sheffield have built the 'domain wall logic' from Permalloy (Ni80Fe20) wires laid down by lithography.
Ones and zeros are represented by the direction of magnetisation along a wire while gates are formed at the junctions where both angle of meeting and wire width are critical.
A NOT gate consists of a 500 by 225 nm dead end fed by a 500 x 100 nm wire and feeding a 500 x 100 nm wire.
A rotating magnetic field in the plane of the device acts as clock and power source and Cowburn sees storing large amounts of data as a possible application.
A 100 GB storage device could be built using around 20 layers of two-dimensional 90 nm wire array.
Power electronics market set to grow
After two years of stagnancy, the power semiconductor devices market is set to prosper, according...
Faster multicore chips
Computer chips' clocks have stopped getting faster. To keep delivering performance...
Extreme-temperature electronics
Many industries are calling for electronics that can operate reliably in a harsh environment,...
