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Technology Science

Stanford, IBM Team To Explore Spintronics 126

Posted by timothy from the good-toy-company-name dept.
saxylife writes "NYTimes and various other media are carrying a story on the latest venture between IBM and Stanford," which will concentrate on spintronics, in other words, controlling "the magnetic orientation of atoms to store data. It's supposed to ease the pressure of hitting the barrier of Moore's law."
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Stanford, IBM Team To Explore Spintronics More

Stanford, IBM Team To Explore Spintronics

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  • Honestly, folks. (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What does Moore's law have to do with spintronics?

  • Magnetics (Score:5, Informative)

    by (54)T-Dub ( 642521 ) * <tpaine.gmail@com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:51PM (#8977685) Journal
    For those of us who have never heard of spintronics here is a quick summation from the article:
    Designing electronics based on how electrons spin instead of how they transmit electrical charges could, in theory, lead to far smaller devices with much lower power requirements and fewer problems with heat buildup. Unlike standard electronics, which represent the ones and zeros of digital information by manipulating voltage and current, spintronics uses magnetic fields to manipulate electronic spin into one of two states called up and down.
    This sounds like a great idea to me. It also seems to me that there has been a lot of talk about using magnetics in data transmision (not storage) for a long time without any real results. It seems very promising considering that a magnetic field moves at the speed of light once it's been created.

    One final interesing quote from the artice:
    One area of concentration will be exploration of Dr. Zhang's research on spin currents. He has reported theoretical support for the concept that spin states can flow from electron to electron just as a charge does, but without generating the resistance that causes energy to be lost every time a charge moves from one transistor to another over a short copper interconnect.

    • obligatory wikipedia... (Score:5, Informative)

      by qrash ( 63400 ) * on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:54PM (#8977720)
      Spintronics

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics

      • Re:obligatory wikipedia... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:59PM (#8977774)
        You slashdotted the wikipedia! It's down! Oh the humanity!
      • Spindizzy [technovelgy.com]
        A device that made use of a relationship between electron spin, electromagnetism and gravity allowed any object to leave the Earth's surface.

        We don't yet have a grand unified field theory or even know for certain how many dimensions there are in our universe. Imagine if researchers made a breakthrough like James Blish's spindizzy while working toward smaller electronics. Don't laugh. There are people working on this right now and not all of them are on the fringe.

    • Re:Magnetics (Score:5, Informative)

      by fbform ( 723771 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:01PM (#8977802)

      I remember there was similar research at Purdue University some months back. Here's the link [purdue.edu] and here's a pic [purdue.edu].

    • Heck.. I thought it was what one did to get elected!

    • Re:Magnetics (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ajlitt ( 19055 )
      It also seems to me that there has been a lot of talk about using magnetics in data transmision (not storage) for a long time without any real results.

      Yes, it's called radio.
    • Now of course I didn't RTFM since that would go against the spirit of /. but this all sounds like you'll have to carry around a flask of liquid nitrogen to run that super small, low power cell phone.

    • Re:Magnetics (Score:5, Informative)

      by wass ( 72082 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:59PM (#8978256)
      It seems very promising considering that a magnetic field moves at the speed of light once it's been created.

      Well, it's really the 'electromagnetic field' that can propogate at the speed of light in a vacuum (in the form of photons, which are of course the fundamental quanta of electromagnetic radiation.

      Magnetic and electric fields are quite related, and only independent phenomena in time-independent processes (ie, electrostatics and magnetostatics). Namely, if you write Maxwell's Equations out and put all time derivatives to zero you really get separation of electric and magnetic fields. But for real systems, changes of one of these induces spatial variations of the other. So they're truly interconnected, and in fact they're most conveniently written in 4-dimensional form that describes special relativity perfectly.

      • Magnetic and electric fields are quite related, and only independent phenomena in time-independent processes (ie, electrostatics and magnetostatics).

        As it turns out, Magnetism does not exist. Magnetism is merely a manifestation of the quantum properties of matter -- Magnetism is the electron wave. In Collective Electrodynamics, Dr. Carver Mead moves beyond Maxwell, and incorporates the benefits of various experiments that Maxwell did not have access to. You can see a review of the book, here [amazon.com].

        • Re:Magnetics (Score:5, Informative)

          by wass ( 72082 ) on Tuesday April 27, 2004 @01:22AM (#8980583)
          What you are talking about is really just Quantum Field Theory explained from a different perspective, which actually has been done since at least Landau and Lifshitz (see their course on Theoretical Physics, volumes 2 and 4). Classical field theory is essentially electrodynamics (relativistic classical EM fields). Quantum Field Theory basically quantizes the field operator, but is difficult for a number of reasons. (Ie, in the 3+1 four-vector, the momentum is a standard operator but time is more of a parameter than operator, so one cannot merely generalize non-relativistic QM that easily. It involves going through alot of clever manipulation.)

          And magnetism does exist, the magnetic and electric fields are really one and the same (in the proper 4-vector formalism). Magnetism can come from electron spin (explained very well in QFT) as well as moving charges (moving electron, for example). Spin has alot of quantum weirdness due to being angular momentum that's always 'just there' and discretized. But it's explained well enough w/ quantum field theory and group theory.

    • Nano-scale Fault Lines (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unfortunately, all the technology in the world will not overcome the key problem of nano-scale structures. The problem is background radiation.

      Tiny nano-scale structures change state when they are hit by alpha particles. Consider experimental atom-wide transistors that switch on a single electron. When an alpha particle hits the gate of such a transistor, it flips state momentaily, causing a chain reaction of corrupted data.

      Fault intolerance constrains the minimum size of the transistors. There is i

      • Unfortunately, all the technology in the world will not overcome the key problem of nano-scale structures.

        Not necessarily true. Just because we don't need to use them anymore with current Si, doesn't mean that fault-tolerant gates can't be designed to compensate for these issues in Spintronics.

        Let's face it, the occurrence of SEUs (single event upsets) is on the order of 200 FITs (failures per million hours), which is pretty low to begin with (now that the industry got rid of the alpha particle sources

  • I'm sorry, but... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by seanmcelroy ( 207852 )

    the last thing I want to do is invest in another technology based on magnetics. Solid state, non-magnetic media have fared far better for me in the long-term, and controlling magnetism on such a granular level only ups the chance that a few bits somewhere will go awry. The article even hints at it.

    • Re:I'm sorry, but... (Score:5, Funny)

      by brxndxn ( 461473 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:55PM (#8977730)
      With bits that small, there's plenty of room for parity bits.
      • Is that what she told you?

        Oh. I thought you said "party."

      • Re:I'm sorry, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @09:33PM (#8978837) Journal
        The parent is modded as funny but it's true. As long as the errors are evenly distributed (i.e., a fundamental effect, vs. a huge-ass scratch across the platter which isn't evenly distributed at all), you can throw enough error correction at the medium to make the unreliability go away.

        This isn't theoretical at all; CDs are routinely "destroyed", but they have a lot of error correction built into them so you don't even notice.

        Computing the exact probabilities left as an exercise to the reader... but given any level of reliability there is some error correction scheme that can bring it up to any other given level of reliability (short of perfect, of course). Of course you can construct pathological cases that need as many bits as you like, the equations work that way too.

    • Re:I'm sorry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wass ( 72082 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:49PM (#8978181)
      controlling magnetism on such a granular level only ups the chance that a few bits somewhere will go awry.

      You're doing the same thing with 'traditional' electronics anyway. As things scale smaller and smaller, eventually the charge of a single electron will be the limiting factor within a bit, and even before that level is reached, fluctuations of several electrons could be large enough to cause things to "go awry" as you say.

      The whole point of spintronics (or magnetoelectronics, it's less buzzword-trendy name) is to add an extra degree of freedom to electronics. Ie, instead of using components that switch on spin-independent electronic charge, one is now adding this extra component that can be switched/amplified/etc.

      It's effectively opening up whole new doors, and spintronics represents the 2nd-rapidest movement of technology from lab to market (after the transistor, of course). The field is in its infancy right now, but has huge potential to revolutionize the types of electronic components that exist.

      As you say, working on such nanoscale systems makes things really hard, and we're trying now to study and overcome these technical difficulties. But people are hopeful this will produce interesting devices, such as using the spin up/down eigenstates of the electron as the basis states for qubits in quantum computers, for example. Or many other quantum-dependent phenomena that are effectively averaged-out in standard electronics.

    • +4 Insightful? No rocket scientist here, but even I understand that this is referring to the magnetic properties of the electrons themselves, and is only incidentally related to what is traditional magnetic media.

      So, unless you don't want to invest in another technology based on electrons, your comment is about as stupid as any in recent memory I've stumbled across. And on slashdot, that's saying something.

  • Already in use (Score:5, Funny)

    by ar1550 ( 544991 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:54PM (#8977721)
    FOX News has been using this technology for years to store the text that is then fed to their teleprompters and news scroller.

    • Informative? (Score:4, Informative)

      by brucmack ( 572780 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:00PM (#8977785)
      Apparently a mod doesn't understand the meaning of 'spin' as it relates to news...

    • Re:Already in use (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by Quobobo ( 709437 )
      Haha... is it just me or are the moderators kind of retarded lately? I can't even count the number of times I've seen jokes like this moderated up as insightful or informative.
      • Maybe it's because they feel that people deserve karma for all positive moderations, including funny, and they are acting on that belief.

        I saw a sig recently suggesting that instead of modding things funny, people should mod things underrated, until the "broken" moderation system is fixed. Well frankly, the very idea of the slashdot crew ever fixing the moderation system is utterly hilarious to me, but it's still a pretty good idea.

        Why should providing humor be any less valuable than providing insight o

        • Re:Already in use (Score:1, Offtopic)

          by Quobobo ( 709437 )
          Hmm, interesting. I agree with the underrated idea, but using insightful or informative really seems like a bad idea..

          I agree with you on the funny mod deserving karma too. Seems to me that on sites with non-threaded discussion (cough, FARK), cracking jokes can get in the way of more relevant discussion, but that's much less of an issue on Slashdot. It's much easier to follow or reply to specific parts of the discussion here (like how we have this totally off-topic branch here).
        • What's really bad about this flaw in the moderation system is this: Suppose you're moded up twice as funny. This does not improve your karma. You are then moded down once. This does affect your karma. The result is that, even though your left with a higher moderation score than you started with, your karma is now lower. So, mods, do us all (and our karma) a favor and mod us underrated, not funny.
        • Why fix it? Just give personal boosts to categories.
          Funny -2
          Informative +3
          Insightful +2
          That's how I run.
    • wow guys, i think PARENT was trying to be FUNNY not INFORMATIVE ... duh ...

    • Re:Already in use (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      FOX News has been using this technology for years to store the text that is then fed to their teleprompters and news scroller.

      You're confused.
      FOX has had to neutralize the leftward spin on items acquired externally. Some people find it difficult to handle the resulting neutral objects, as they're used to items which have ridiculous charges. With a little thought, many people are able to avoid the errors of folk with simpler abilities.
      It would be simpler if common sense were common. Too many people le

      • Wait, this is another joke right? Fox, neutral?
      • You're confused. FOX has had to neutralize the leftward spin on items acquired externally. Some people find it difficult to handle the resulting neutral objects, as they're used to items which have ridiculous charges.

        Actually I think Einstein's concept of relative frames applies here -- there is no "absolute leftward spin", or "absolute rightward spin", only a differential relative to the user's own spin. Thus, Observer A (say, Al Franken) and Observer B (perhaps Rush Limbaugh), when both observing the

  • Take into consideration advances as such? Or is is just a die shrinking rule of thumb?

  • Unintended Side effects (Score:5, Funny)

    by MacGabhain ( 198888 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:00PM (#8977783)
    Since every electron has a pair somewhere in the universe whose spin will change when the electron in the computing device changes, how long will it be before someone playing DOOM XI unintentionally causes the navigation systems aboard the Narthon flagship to fail, leading to it inadvertantly straying into Drakoid space, setting off an interstellar conflict that eventually leads to the destruction of all life in our galaxy?

  • General information on spintronics (Score:5, Informative)

    by leeum ( 156395 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:02PM (#8977810) Homepage Journal
    For those (like myself) who have little idea about spintronics, Wikipedia has a general article that seemed to explain it to me quite well. Of course, I'm not a physicist so I have no idea whether or not it's accurate although I'm tempted to find out more from the referenced article. PhysicsWeb [physicsweb.org] has more of the same. Apparently this will have far-reaching implications on RAM [ibm.com] and cable bandwidth [sciencedaily.com].

  • Will spin tunnel as well? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by topynate ( 694371 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:06PM (#8977845)
    Electrons can tunnel across a gate: can variables like spin do the same thing? If so, that's another barrier.

    • Re:Will spin tunnel as well? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:30PM (#8978026)
      Electrons carry both charge and spin. They can tunnel.
      Spin is a property not a particle, hence your
      question makes no sense (even RVB diehards who argue
      for spin-charge separation in some materials will
      assign spin to some quasiparticle, a "spinon", and
      even in those cases tunneling is reserved for
      electrons).
      Your question is a bit like: "what does blue taste
      like?"

    • Re:Will spin tunnel as well? (Score:5, Informative)

      by wass ( 72082 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:53PM (#8978219)
      Electrons can tunnel across a gate: can variables like spin do the same thing? If so, that's another barrier.

      Yes, it's still the electrons tunneling across. And it's quite appropriate that you use the word 'barrier'.

      There are spin tunnel junctions, where the electron tunnels through an insulator, and people are measuring how long the spin can be preserved if the electron tunnels into a standard metal. Ie, after enough scattering points the spin will be effectively randomized.

      But yes, electrons are tunneling, and in some cases the spin of the electron (whether up or down) determines how well it will tunnel through the barrier. So spin is really another parameter that can be controlled to make spin-transistors or spin valves more dynamic than traditional transistors.

  • The no spin zone (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrLint ( 519792 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:09PM (#8977868) Journal
    I ope soon we will see a breakthru on media that will require no moving parts in the media, but still give the same I/O speed as current mechanical devices. I know from experience that at least half the time of a drive failure is due to mechanics. But much of the other half is still due to mechanics but appears to be a platter problem?

    • They exist... (Score:3, Informative)

      by DarkMan ( 32280 )
      but are expensive. Battery backed RAM disks.

      The reason such things are expensive (and will likely remain so), is because with no moving parts, you have to have connectors to each bit of storage. That's a lot of interconnects requires, which takes up space, adding to the cost. Once you have a large enough array of bits, the routing of the data and address lines becomes the dominant factor in the construction.

  • With all of the new advancedments in Computational Physics, when will we give up on Moore's law ? There are already several different technoligies set to break it into pieces.

  • Moore's law is not a physical law. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Magickcat ( 768797 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:14PM (#8977919)
    Yet another article that confuses "Moore's law" as an actual physical law. Jouralists are often unfortunately out of their depth when it comes to Moore's law as it's a bit more complicated than using Word.

    Moore's law is not a physical law whatsover and has no bearing on actual chip development or progress. It is merely a way to predict the miniaturisation of chips. It does not take into account manufacturing processes whatsover, and so there is no theoretical end to it when current chip miniturisation techniques reach their theoretical or actual fundamental physical limits.

    Instead, Moore's law is a time scale that predicts microchip technological advancement and it certainly isn't a precise observation.

    Every so often, somebody starts to claim that Moore's law is broken, or going to be broken, or can't hold any longer. It never happens and is usually just the PR department looking for an interesting angle on a mildly interesting discovery.

    • I'd put this one on a similar plane as that "15 minutes of fame thing"--it just spread and people just regurgitate it. Like some cancerous meme.
      • "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

        - Andy Warhol

        Its a pretty insightful (not to mention funny) observation about our television obsessed culture. Think about reality TV and then realize that the quote was made in the 60s.
    • Not only that, it applies to chip speed not storage space which is what this spintronics thing is about.
    • It seems that the upper edge of PC power had hit a plateau a couple years ago. I remember 3GHz chips in Summer 2002, a year and a half later, it's now 3.4GHz / 3400+, not the 6000 range that it might have been had the "law" held true.
      • "It seems that the upper edge of PC power had hit a plateau a couple years ago. I remember 3GHz chips in Summer 2002, a year and a half later, it's now 3.4GHz / 3400+, not the 6000 range that it might have been had the "law" held true."

        Astute observation. Although I find my shiny new Athlon64 3000 to be much, much faster at almost all things, in comparison to my good friends' 18-month-old 3.0GHz P4. (all other variables being almost equal. very similar systems.)

        Does, or perhaps should, the mythical Moo
        • The only thing moore's law considers is the number of transistors in a CPU - architecture / clock speed and even actual performance are not considered at all.

          The fact that this typicaly corresponds in some way with the power of of the CPU is what leads to the common misconception (and misuse) that Moore's law is talking about power - or even worse, clock speed.

      • Re:Moore's law is not a physical law. (Score:4, Informative)

        by adamfranco ( 600246 ) <adam@NoSPAm.adamfranco.com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @10:39PM (#8979252) Homepage
        "Moore's law" does not refer to the speed of processors doubling, but that the number of transistors [intel.com] that can be fit into a given area doubling every 18 months or so.

        The shrinking of transistor sizes has lead to smaller, cooler, faster, more powerful chips, but the speed increase is just a side effect of the smaller transistors. Were chip engineers more interested in packing more operations each cycle onto a chip, then you would see slower clock speeds with similar densities of transistors on larger areas (with more heat buildup being the speed limiter) -- something akin to the PowerPC chips vs the high-speed Pentiums. Similar densites of transistors and the PPCs actually do more floating-point operations per second (flops) than a Pentium that runs at about twice the clock.

  • Moore's is not a law (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:22PM (#8977969)
    Moore's Law is not a law and should not be given that status.

    The term "law" should only be applied to true laws, eg. thermodynamics, Newton's and Murphy's.

  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:25PM (#8977984) Homepage
    SCO's marketing department will use "Spintronics" to indicate that they, in fact, have made 100 Billion dollars in the last quarter alone and have signed up 100000% more linux licenses than the previous quarter.

    Linus, meanwhile, pointed out that 100000% more of nothing is still nothing.

  • This is Cool Stuff! (Score:5, Informative)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:39PM (#8978095) Homepage Journal

    I saw a presentation on spintronics given at WorldCon by Kevin Roche, who is one of the IBM researchers developing this stuff. He will be giving another presentation on it at -- of all places -- BayCon 2004.

    I found his talk absolutely fascinating. He's basically created a "transistor" that allows through only electrons of a particular spin. Once you have an electric current composed of electrons spinning all the same way, you can do lots of unexpected things. One example: Light-emitting diodes emit polarized light! Even if you have only a cursory exposure to physics or chemistry, you'd probably enjoy his talk.

    Schwab

    • Re:This is Cool Stuff! (Score:5, Informative)

      by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @08:03PM (#8978287)
      He's basically created a "transistor" that allows through only electrons of a particular spin.
      What, you mean, like, say... a magnetic field? *grin* Seriously though, for those who aren't really familiar with spin, theres a decent quick-and-dirty spin primer here [gsu.edu], which includes a bit of details on the stern-gerlach experiment, which shows one way one might select electrons of only a certain spin.
  • IBM is doing research into more effective PR?
  • this is cool and all, and great for the field. it brings it to a bit higher profile, and throws more money at it. i'm doing a phd on spintronics, and have met a few of the people involved. unfortunately, i doubt i'll be transfering to stanford, and it will be years till i graduate and could consider working at ibm.

    hopefully good things will come from this.
  • The theory sounds a bit like the old bubble memory developed by IBM many moons ago..

    Just taken to the next level...

    Interesting stuff if they can pull it off...

  • MRAM (Score:5, Informative)

    by anethema ( 99553 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @10:21PM (#8979123) Homepage
    MRAM uses spintronics to store data. Its supposed to be very fast (dram speeds), dense, and not too expensive.

    Oh did I mention non-volatile ?

    This isnt some fancy technology thats going to maybe apear in ten years.

    There are preliminary datasheets out now right here. [cypress.com]

    I cant wait to change my hdd over to this stuff (welll, that may be years away ;)
  • Ok people above the equator...

    I live down under (in Australia). Given that spintronics is based on the concepts of up and down, would I need to install spintronic equipment inverted?

    :-) Yes its lame, but it is late Tuesday afternoon as I write and I really need to go home.
  • I though this was going to be another election year article. Instead it's about magnetic spin in atoms.

    SPIN-A-TRON said from Washington today that everything was under control after a momentary glitch in the new Skynet command and control computers. It would be sending out T101 "claims adjusters" to process damage claims due to the malfunction...
  • Once the force and creation of gravity is understood well a computer/storage medium that manipulates and measures gravitational forces could be used to store data.. Does anyone more learned in physics than I know if gravitational wave propogation is limited to speed of light? -gft
  • /. should have a section that lists what publications like "Popular Science", "Scientific American", etc., predicted back "X number of years ago" things that would be available today, commercially or otherwise like they do with "X years ago, today, content was...". That would be interesting.

    cragen

    ps. Lots of great ideas go pfft for reasons that were once thought not to be a problem -- like the hovercrafts that were once predicted to cause roads to be obsolete. Noise, cost, etc., ended that little drea

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