Magnetic Processors - Computing's New Future?

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."

Crinkled

[HaydnH (877214)]

"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...

[creimer (824291)]

Will these new processors work when the Earth's magnetic field eventually flip over?

Re:Flipping magnets...

[jcgf (688310)]

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!

[Roadkills-R-Us (122219)]

I degaussed the monitor on the cart in the computer room and reset every processor in the compute farm!

Re:Flipping magnets...

[plover (150551)]

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!

Magnetic monopoles

[goombah99 (560566)]

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.

"ideal" transistor

[vlad_petric (94134)]

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

[goombah99 (560566)]

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.

[goombah99 (560566)]

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?

Radical new chip design?

[mc6809e (214243)]

"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?

[peter303 (12292)]

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?

[michaelmichael (859793)]

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"

[Dan East (318230)]

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"

[grungebox (578982)]

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"

[williamhb (758070)]

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

[Psionicist (561330)]

Electicity... magnetism... Bah. Show me a processor working entirely by gravity!

Re:I have heard this before

[wiggles (30088)]

No problem. I have an old Pentium Pro chip and heat sink I use as a paperweight!

Re:I have heard this before

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS (313647)]

Here http://www.bardavid.com/mc/index.html [bardavid.com] is one.

Why I'm skeptical in the short-term

[G4from128k (686170)]

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...

[eno2001 (527078)]

...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!

[nysus (162232)]

Don't put that subwoofer next to my computer!

We're coming back to this now?

[pclminion (145572)]

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 the article didnt mention

[Ancient_Hacker (751168)]

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

[Dashing Leech (688077)]

"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!".

New scientist article

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

http://www.newscientist.com.nyud.net:8090/channel/ mech-tech/nanotechnology/dn8575 [nyud.net]

They say that a magnetic insulator would have to be used to shield the chip from external interference.

Cowburn, who is working with MRAM makers on developing the technology, suggests a common magnetic shielding material may have to be built into such chips. Called mu-metal, it is an alloy of nickel, iron, copper and molybdenum. "It's effectively a Faraday Cage for magnetic devices," he explains.