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Magnetic Processors - Computing's New Future?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Feb 14, 2006 11:50 AM
from the i'm-positively-charge-about-this dept.
Hardware Technology
metalcoat writes "For the first time researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors. As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore's Law, a group of electrical engineers at the University of Notre Dame has fabricated a chip that uses nanoscale magnetic "islands" to juggle the ones and zeroes of binary code. Wolfgang Perod and his colleagues turned to the process of magnetic patterning (.pdf) to produce a new chip that uses arrays of separate magnetic domains. Each island maintains its own magnetic field. Because the chip has no wires, its device density and processing power may eventually be much higher than transistor-based devices. And it won't be nearly as power-hungry, which will translate to less heat emission and a cooler future for portable hardware like laptops."
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  • Crinkled (Score:5, Funny)

    by HaydnH (877214) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @11:52AM (#14716771)
    "For the first time researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design..."

    I thought this had already happened when they moved from straight cut to crinkle cut??

  • Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)

    by creimer (824291) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @11:53AM (#14716787) Homepage
    Will these new processors work when the Earth's magnetic field eventually flip over?
    • Yes.

      Who modded this insightful? People say there are no stupid questions, but this one is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
    • They already thought of that. When the flip happens, they'll simply tell the processor (through firmware) to simply act as it normally would except now invert all results.

    • Oops! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Roadkills-R-Us (122219) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:04PM (#14716887) Homepage
      I degaussed the monitor on the cart in the computer room and reset every processor in the compute farm!
    • Hey, I watched that NOVA [pbs.org] too, and it's the first thing I thought of when I saw this.

      I suppose that, just like all toilets swirl the other direction down under, when the poles swap these computers will run backwards... (hmmm, what would all that pr0n look like in reverse?)
      ;-)

      • I suppose that, just like all toilets swirl the other direction down under, when the poles swap these computers will run backwards... (hmmm, what would all that pr0n look like in reverse?)

        Russian

      • Coriolis effect is basically negligible across the 12 inches or whatever the major diameter a toilet bowl is. The shape of the bowl and the angle water flows into and out of it at are going to have a greater effect on the direction of flow than Coriolis effect. I wouldn't be surprised if mythbusters has tried this one.

        When I first heard this claim, I watched the water drain out of the sink that night when washing dishes. I was a little disturbed when it swirled down the drain clockwise.
      • what would all that pr0n look like in reverse?

        Everybody goes to church and votes Republican?
      • just like all toilets swirl the other direction down under
        They don't. It's a myth. The Coriolis force is too weak to enforce the direction of swirl. It depends on the toilet.
    • Only if you take them to Australia. I believe their magnetic spin will then change from counterclockwise to clockwise.

      On an unrelated note, imagine a beowulf cluster of these things -- all stuck together and you can't pry them apart!

  • This will be really interesting when it's mature. I don't know that the results will be quite the snake-oil-will-solve-all-your-problems that the article claims, but this could well be a huge deal in five years.

    I hope they've patented it!

    • pretty cool--I hope they've patented it!

            I bet _somebody_ has...

      • Re:pretty cool--I hope they've patented it! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Dashing Leech (688077) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:27PM (#14717091)
        "I bet _somebody_ has..."

        I bet one of two things happens. Either someone tries to patent it 5 years after being on the market, and perhaps succeeds since by then patent agents will only have 8 seconds to decide if an idea is patentable, or somebody currently has an obscure patent of a vague rough idea that they never produced that sounds slightly similar to this, which doesn't show up on searches, and they'll keep quiet about it until this thing makes billions and then say "Hey, you owe me money!".

    • but this could well be a huge deal in five years.

            Especially if it turns out these "magnetic" chips have a limited life of 5 years or so, forcing you to keep shelling out money to the chipmakers...then they don't even need to be innovative to continue to receive the periodic upgrade money they have become so used to.

  • Magnetic monopoles (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goombah99 (560566) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @11:58AM (#14716836)
    Since magnetic monopoles dont exist, you have to use magnetic dipoles or higher order moments. this translates in to macoscopic structures. It's hard to see how this could beat monopole electrons in size or group velocity. As for power consumption, it's true that magnetism can have low queiscent power consumption because of it's hysterises making it non-volatile. But you pay aprice for this when you have to switch it's state. on the other hand the ideal transistor consumes no power when it is not switching states. If you got rid of the hysteresis in magnetism to make it faster and lower power then it too will become volatile like electronics.

    I can see how this could create dense active bulk storage, such as was done long ago with magnetic bubble memory. But I'm skeptical about a pure magnetic logic system beating electronics.
    • Today's small transistors are far from ideal. Leakage currents are a huge concern for portable devices.
    • And how does it switch? The time for a magnetic field to collapse is much slower than a transistor.

    • "ideal" transistor (Score:5, Informative)

      by vlad_petric (94134) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:16PM (#14717001) Homepage
      True, an ideal CMOS doesn't have any leakage; these days, however, the very small feature sizes translate into more and more leakage, mainly because of the tunneling effect. It's not uncommon for the leakage power to be one fifth of the entire power consumption; unfortunately, with future generations, this will only get worse.

      • Re:"ideal" transistor (Score:5, Insightful)

        by goombah99 (560566) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:46PM (#14717261)
        My point was that while we associate magnetism with low power persistent memory and electronics with fast, high power memory, you are going to have to shed the desirable properties of magnetism to achieve speed. At that point you may find it as leaky and power hungry as electronics. Conversely, if you are willing to make electronics slower you can make more ideal, less leaky transistors. I was not saying that transistors in use have ideal properties, but that extrapolating current magnetic goodness to it's future applications may make it less ideal too.

    • Blast from the past. (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 (560566) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:22PM (#14717047)
      Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] for Magnetic Bubble memory. I worked on Magnetic Bubble memory at IBM san jose, and the wired article sounds like this is the nano-scale version of this with some big improvements in how they are manipualted. Back then the "bubbles" were a few microns in size. You patterns permaloy onto the surface of a magnetic material. Usually this was a long loop of almost touching chevrons or T-shaped permaloy elements. the bulk materila was polarized one direction (normal to the chip) and inversions in this formed round "bubbles" for reasons simmilar to surface tension these bubbles were stable in one size and liked to stick to the chevron. Under a polarized light microscope you could see the "bubbles" in contrast sticking to the chevrons, giving them their name due to their appearance. one bubble stuck to one chevron. and the presence or absense of a bubble on a chevron was a 1 or 0. in some fancy schema the bubbles could hold internal higher order domain structures to encode more than one bit per bubble but these were never made practical.

      A rotating magnetic field transverse to the chip would cause the chevrons to act like little iron bar bagnets pulling the bubble from one side to the other. because the chevron shape is asymetric it acted like a rachet and would only move the bubble unidirectionally. If the field was strong enough the bubble would then "leap" to the next chevron. Under the microscope you saw marching "bits" moving along. so you could move all the bit patterns like a train along the tracks in a bulk matterial with one layer of passive patterning. at one point in the loop track you placed a reader and a writer. this way you had sequential access to any bit and could inject or delete bits in the train.

      When the power went off the bubbles stayed put.

      It never made it to market (fuji made some) because it's niche was too small. it was slower than ram but faster than a hard drive. it was cheaper than ram but more expensive than a hard drive. At the time it was denser than ram but less dense than a harddrive. Thus it's only use was as a cache between ram and harddrives and in applications where robustness and non-voltility would be valuable like high-radiation sattelites and point of sale terminals. The latter market was eaten by EAROM and then flash memory.

      this new material sounds like it uses simmilar concepts but is much smaller and actually performs bubble logic. Not sure about where the clock comes from: perhaps it's still a rotatin mag fiield?
    • Magnetic dipoles have to be macroscopic? Doesn't an electron have an intrinsic magnetic moment? Certainly an electron in an atomic orbital creates one. I don't think size is the problem here, at least not in theory.

  • Radical new chip design? (Score:4, Informative)

    by mc6809e (214243) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @11:58AM (#14716839)
    "For the first time researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design.."

    Hmm. Maybe.

    But this seems a lot like bubble memory [wikipedia.org] to me.

    And while the wiki entry doesn't mention using this for direct computation, it is indeed possible.

    • more like Programmable Logic Arrays? (Score:4, Informative)

      by peter303 (12292) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @01:18PM (#14717486)
      Magnetic bubbles move. Its principle resembles that of delay line memory [wikipedia.org] used in computers before the invention of core and disk memory: You have huge circulating loops one can access at choosen spots to read a record. (People are working on optical delay line memory to store petabytes and picosecond speeds.)

      I interpret this new magnetic technology to be a more compact implementation of programmable logic arrays [wikipedia.org]. PLAs are standard tool in digital circuit design and can theoretically emulate any other digital state machine such as a CPU. Engineers like them because they are like blank circuits you can quickly burn a pattern in them. New high-density PLA chips in the 1980s lead to the rise of the mini-supercomputer industry, with companies like Convex using them. However, general purpose CPUs from Intel and Sun eventually exceeded 1990s PLA speeds and circuit capacities.

  • Faster than transistors? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by michaelmichael (859793) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:00PM (#14716849)
    I didn't see anything in the article about the magnets being faster than transistors. Yes, being able to cram more onto a chip will make a faster processor but are the magnetic "islands" faster in and of themselves?

  • Moore's "law" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East (318230) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:00PM (#14716855) Homepage
    As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore's Law

    The submitter speaks of Moore's law as if it were some actual law governing the physics of silicon based integrated circuits. His "law" was nothing more than an observation regarding the time it took the industry to pack more transistors into a given space. It makes no assertions regarding maximum transistor density, heat dissipation, or any of the other physical limitations chip manufacturers keep overcoming.

    Dan East

    • Re:Moore's "law" (Score:4, Informative)

      by grungebox (578982) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:20PM (#14717032) Homepage
      Yes and no. Yes, it's true that Moore's Law is not a "law" as such, but when people speak of "hitting the limit of Moore's Law" or "the end of Moore's Law" they are almost always referring to a physical limitatation to the trend of increasing transistor density and switching speeds. It's easier to say "the limit of Moore's Law" than "the regime where transistor density cannot be increased appreciably without a radical change in current semiconductor processing technology."

          • Re:Moore's "law" (Score:5, Informative)

            by williamhb (758070) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:57PM (#14717341) Homepage Journal
            It may be true that Moore's law became the industry expectation, but given the winner-take-all nature of semiconductor manufacturing I have a hard time believing that IBM/AMD/Intel etc are simplying "developing to the timeline".


            Specifically they are developing to the International Technological Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is produced by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), of which Intel, AMD, IBM, etc are members. This is the little-known [by the public] pre-competitive stage of the semi-conductor industry in which they all get together and collaborate on developing a "best available industrial consensus" on the way that the industry should move forward (choice of semiconductor technologies, etc).

            This lecture by Sir Maurice Wilkes http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mvw1/Progress_in_Computer s_IEE_Cambridge_2004_web.pdf [cam.ac.uk] contains details.

  • I have heard this before (Score:4, Funny)

    by Psionicist (561330) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:00PM (#14716859)
    Electicity... magnetism... Bah. Show me a processor working entirely by gravity!

  • Why I'm skeptical in the short-term (Score:4, Interesting)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:04PM (#14716889)
    The chip industry spends billions in R&D to extend the performance growth of silicon chips. A very large number of engineers know how to design efficient fabs for silicon. Until this technology also attracts a sufficient following of $ and manufacturing experience, I won't count silicon out.

    Also, it's not clear that this technology isn't subject to same "limits of Moore's law" (if there is such a thing) as silicon chips. The use of electron-beam lithography would seem to mean that this technology is subject to the some of the same feature-size and practicality limits suffered by silicon chips.

    Perhaps this technology will find a place somewhere, it just faces a major uphill battle if it is to supplant silicon.

  • Yeah Right... (Score:5, Funny)

    by eno2001 (527078) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:07PM (#14716908) Homepage Journal
    ...and next you'll be telling me that tabletop fusion has been discovered, there are parasitic viruses that alter the host's behavior, and that someone invented the plasma drive at NASA. You're ready to swallow all that pseudoscience and yet you all deny me when I try to inform you about the return of the Niburu and Planet X by the great Zecharia Sitchin!!! It's unbelievable just how gullible the Slashdot crowd is and how blind they are to honest truth.

  • Wait! Stop! (Score:3, Funny)

    by nysus (162232) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:12PM (#14716955)
    Don't put that subwoofer next to my computer!

  • We're coming back to this now? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pclminion (145572) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:12PM (#14716957)
    My boss tells a story about one of his supervisors back in the 1960's who was terribly excited about the new emerging field of magnetic computation. It promised to be faster and more reliable than the current systems based on relays. There were solid-state systems available but they were prohibitively expensive.

    This supervisor poured much time and effort into his team, investigating various concepts of magnetic computation. Then the integrated circuit came along and turned him into a ruined man.

    So have we finally come full-circle now, back to magnetic computation? Call me conservative but I don't think it will fare any better this time around.

  • What about electronic surveillance? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PFI_Optix (936301) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:12PM (#14716963) Journal
    Wasn't it just a couple of years ago that they were reading keystrokes through walls by way of magnetic induction?

    I know "reading" a CPU is a bit more complex (understatement), but given enough time and resources someone will figure it out. We're already broadcasting our keystrokes and network communications, how easy do we need to make it?

  • What the article didnt mention (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ancient_Hacker (751168) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @12:57PM (#14717338)
    Did the article say anything about Speed?

    Magnetic circuits have been studied for at least 80 years. The basic problem is one of size and speed. A dipole magnet (onr with N and S poles) has a certain minimum size, otherwise it depolarizes itself. That sets a minimum size for any magnetic device. Also it's hard to make magnetic amplifiers with more than a small fan-out. It's also really hard to distribute a clock signal-- magnetic pulses fall off at a 1/r^3 rate, and generating a fast magnetic pulse gets blocked by the inductance of the coil.

    Now there *are* cigarette-pack to Taj Mahal sized magnetic voltage regulators in use. Your PC power supply may be using one to regulate the 3.3 volt output. But getting them down to IC-size is going to be really hard to impossible.

    • Re:What the article didnt mention (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It seems as though you are picturing actual magnets and wires in this processor. With QCA you are working down to the level of single electrons. The natural force between electrons that pushes them apart is the magnetic force that QCA uses: essentially each little bit could be though of as a square of 2x2, with 2 electrons in opposite corners, say top-right and bottom-left. If you force an electron next to the top-right of the square, the two electrons IN the square will shift around to be in the top-left a

  • Limits (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cluening (6626) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @02:06PM (#14718021) Homepage
    As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore's Law

    Actually, I don't think "Moore's Law" has a limit. An off-the-cuff comment that the number of transistors in a processor will double every 18 months doesn't have a limit. It just keeps getting higher and higher.

  • Hmmm, Now where did I put that .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by 3seas (184403) on Tuesday February 14 2006, @02:30PM (#14718324) Homepage Journal
    ...demagnitizer....

    Oh my, I'm seeing spots, sun spots...

    A new lower power level of EMP weapons has been announced, following the announcement of the first commercial Magnetic computing....
  • Scientific American had a rather lengthy article [teuscher.ch] on magnetologic devices not long ago. MRAM is a limited version of them that can only change the magnetization of the top magnetic layer - full magnetologic devices can switch both sides.

    Although they're a wonderful technology that in the right hands would permit vast improvements in computation, I'm scared to think what a painful experience it would be to program such a device. We have enough trouble dealing with CPUs that have fixed instruction sets and few enough ASM programmers as it is. Is a person even capable of programming such a device efficiently, or writing software to do the same? I'm pretty sure that just having a 10x10 matrix of them to keep track of would be hard for me - I can't imagine trying to write code to control a whole CPU of them that wouldn't be hopelessly bogged down with getGateStatus()- and setGateStatus()-type functions.

    Or would their role be more limited - switching individual gates to be AND/OR/NOT/NAND in hardware, for instance, so you would do setGateFunction(gate_no, wanted_function); LOGIC_OP rather than having a switch? Or perhaps they would be hard enough to program that you would have to use just a handful of pre-written setups for them, optimizing for games or math performance? loadChipSetup(long_math.mag) or loadChipSetup(fast_string_ops.mag)?

    Now imagine the next generation of viruses rewiring your CPU to do God-knows-what.
    • "the process of magnetic patterning (.pdf) " - isn't that supposed to be a link?

      RTFA -- the submitter just copied and pasted the first four paragraphs of the article in his submission.

    • If "metalcoat", "The Winner", submitted the article ONE MINUTE before you did, then, they would have been placed it in the queue and rejeced ALL similar subsequent submissions. In other words, we shall refer to you as "The Loser". Get used to it. Roland P. submits about 400 articles a day. You are lucky if you beat him to the punch one time in six months.

    • Re:More uses? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mikael (484)
      That wouldn't be any different from an ordinary CPU. You can erase your CPU simply by turning off the power. An EMP only needs to make one transistor change state in order for the CPU to go wonky. Although you may want to worry more about stray cosmic rays [filibeto.org].
    • For all you youngins out there magnetic core memory is an old kind of memory that used a tiny circular magnet with wires running through it to hold each bit. It was a one or zero based on which direction the magnetic energy flowed through it.

      I have about 128 bits of it sitting in my closet somewhere. It is not based on a power of two like ram is now, but the length X width of the number of magnets on each side.

      A close-up picture of it [museumwaalsdorp.nl]

    • It's actually beneficial that a single 'gate' element can perform AND, OR, and INVERT
      functions all in one stage. The early TTL won over other logic designs in part because
      the basic gate used multiple emitters on the input transistor to get an AND function,
      and multiple input transistors to get the OR function. That meant that the delay
      and complexity character of AND and OR were the same, and that the complex function
      of AND/OR/INVERT was available as a fast multiplexer, with the same characteristics
      as a sim
    • To 'shield from magnetic fields' is generally the same thing as 'generate an
      opposing magnetic field'; that means the shield materials ARE affected,
      and are in fact somewhat magnetized, to create the shielding
      effect.

      The best shield materials are superconductors (which only exist at low
      temperatures). The most common magnetic shield materials are soft
      iron alloys (Permalloy and Mu-Metal are brand names). Shielding
      from rapidly-changing magnetism is easier, most electrical conductors
      will do this (but supercond

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