Magnetic Silicon
Very cool tech hack from
University at Albany - SUNY
bq. Silicon is best known as the material used to make semiconductor computer chips with integrated circuits. Today, scientists at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) at the University at Albany published research that could lay the foundation for using silicon to develop chips with magnetic properties, potentially impacting the development of electron-spin-based or "spintronic" devices.
bq. Spintronics exploits the quantum mechanical property of electron spin, as well as its charge state. Potential spintronics applications include magnetic random access memory (MRAM), which could enable the development of computing devices that are always on, don't require time to "boot up" and don't require a traditional hard drive.
bq. While semiconductor materials such as silicon are utilized for memory and central processing units, the permanent information in computers is stored in magnetized hard drives which utilize the spin of the electron.. Recent research has discovered that a semiconductor can be made magnetic by doping it with an impurity such as Mn. The resulting material or diluted magnetic semiconductor (DMS) combines the properties of magnetism used in permanent information storage with that of semiconductor memory and logic devices. DMS spintronic devices have the potential to operate at considerably higher speeds and consume less power than conventional devices.
And I wonder when this will hit the streets - I would guess about four years and some people are going to become very wealthy. Good for them - this is amazing work!
Posted by DaveH at January 23, 2005 3:13 PM