Magnets rival power-hungry transistors

• Autores: Paul Marks
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2981, 2014, pág. 9
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Microchips made from tiny magnets rather than conventional power-hungry transistors may enable intensive number-crunching tasks like codebreaking or image-processing using a fraction of the power. In traditional computer chips, the bits of information, 0s and 1s, are represented by voltages across a transistor, each of which needs its own wire. But magnets can do the same job by switching their pole orientation: pointing north-south represents 1, say, and south-north is 0. Flipping poles takes less energy than running current through a wire, so they need less power to run. Now, a team led by Irina Eichwald at the Technical University of Munich in Germany has worked out how to grow a chip with number-crunching layers 100 nanomagnets deep.