Originally published February 26 2006
Researchers create radical new chip based on magnetism
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The new prototype chip is based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors, and because the chip has no wires, its density and processing power may one day surpass transistor-based devices.
For the first time, researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors.
As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore's Law, a group of electrical engineers at the University of Notre Dame has fabricated a chip that uses nanoscale magnetic "islands" to juggle the ones and zeroes of binary code.
Wolfgang Porod and his colleagues turned to the process of magnetic patterning (.pdf) to produce a new chip that uses arrays of separate magnetic domains.
The magnetic chip's memory is nonvolatile, making it impervious to power interruptions, and it retains its data when the device is switched off.
The magnetic architecture of the chip can be reprogrammed on the fly and its adaptability could make it very popular with manufacturers of special-purpose computing hardware, from video-game platforms to medical diagnostic equipment.
The chip's nanomagnets -- on the order of 110 nanometers wide -- can be assembled into arrays that mirror the function of transistor-based logic gates in addition to storing information.
These logic gates are the building blocks of computer technology, giving microchips the power to process the endless rivers of binary code.
A NAND logic gate, for example, accepts two inputs to arrive at one output.
This exotic method of transistorless processing -- known as magnetic quantum cellular automata -- originally used individual electrons as quantum dots, arranged in a matrix of cells to handle logic operations.
But nanoscale magnets proved to be a much better alternative because they were not subject to stray electrical charges, and they were easier to fabricate.
Logic operations within the processor commence with a pulsed magnetic field on the input magnet, which alters the orientation of its magnetic field.
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