Japanese Scientists Creating
New Field of Electronics
New Field of Electronics
Boyé Lafayette De Mente
Japanese scientists have tapped into the power that emanates from electrons that orbit around the nucleus of atoms, heralding a new generation of technology that may usher in a new digital age.
Tohoku University Prof. Hideo Ono has teamed with Hitachi Ld. scientists to create new computing and digital device technology based on the electrons that spin around a nucleus, providing computing power at much faster speeds and with less heat and less power consumption. The new technology has been dubbed “spintronics.”
Prof. Ono and his team are now working on spintronic elements for a type of memory device known as MRAM (magnetoresistive random-access memory), which would break through the speed, heat and power consumption barriers.
According to reports, when in a waiting mode the MRAM device consumes one-thousandth of the power and has half the normal delay time of today’s devices. Using spintronic elements, memory circuits can be built with 40 percent fewer transistors, resulting in a dramatic decrease in size.
A prototype MRAM chip using spintronics, capable of storing two megabytes of data, was successfully tested in February 2007.
The new process will allow Prof. Ono and his Hitachi team to integrate memory with a central processing unit’s computation circuitry on a single chip. [Some features of spintronics have been in use in hard-drives for several years.]
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