Berkeley Researchers Demonstrate Ultra Low Energy Magnetic Chips
Engineers at UC Berkeley have demonstrated that magnetic chips can "operate at the lowest
fundamental energy dissipation theoretically possible under the laws of
thermodynamics," according to a news story on the university's site.
The findings have been published in a paper in the peer-reviewed
journal Science Advances.
For
decades, manufacturers have been packing an increasing number of
ever-tinier and ever-faster transistors onto electronic chips. "Making
transistors go faster was requiring too much energy," said Jeffrey
Bokor, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer
sciences and lead author on the paper, on the university's site. "The
chips were getting so hot they'd just melt."
The researchers
demonstrated for the first time that magnetic chips could reach the
Landauer limit, the lowest possible amount of energy required by each
single-bit operation in a computer, "as little as one-millionth the
amount of energy per operation used by transistors in modern
computers," according to the Berkeley news story. Bokor and his team
published a paper in 2011 that said the Landauer limit could
theoretically be reached, but they have now demonstrated the theory.
The paper is a proof of principle, but it will take time to put
magnetic chips into production, according to Berkeley's news story.
Bokor
conducted the research project in collaboration with Jeongmin Hong, a
postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley; Brian Lambson, a graduate
student at UC Berkeley; and Scott Dhuey, a principal scientific
engineering associate at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Energy.
The
paper, "Experimental test of Landauer's principle in single-bit
operations on nanomagnetic memory bits," can be found on the Science Advances site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.