Magnetic Transistor Could Cut Power Consumption and Make Chips Reprogrammable 126
ananyo writes "Transistors, the simple switches at the heart of all modern electronics, generally use a tiny voltage to toggle between 'on' and 'off.' The voltage approach is highly reliable and easy to miniaturize, but has its disadvantages. First, keeping the voltage on requires power, which drives up the energy consumption of the microchip. Second, transistors must be hard-wired into the chips and can't be reconfigured, which means computers need dedicated circuitry for all their functions. Now, researchers have made a type of transistor that can be switched with magnetism. The device could cut the power consumption of computers, cell phones and other electronics — and allow chips themselves to be 'reprogrammed' (abstract)."
Re:Chips are "reprogrammable" (Score:5, Insightful)
Been so for 25 years. It's called FLASH memory.
They mean the transistors are programmable. If you can change the chip logic, you can get custom behaviours at top speed. Flash is for firmware, but doesn't change the chip itself. This stuff is awesome if it can be made to be as fast as a regular transistor. OTOH magnetism itself is a bit of a worry, as the chip could get wiped quite easily.
Timing is critical (Score:2)
What if that chip got wiped in the middle of a very critical mission?
Current crop of chips made of silicon transistors don't have that problem, unless the force of electro-magnetic interference got so great that it fries the chips.
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Magnetic Shielding (Score:3)
mu-Metal works better than iron. It has 80-100 times better shielding capability. It's also lighter (kinda a big thing for space use...)
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Yeah, the Best Buy guy told me I need mu-metal shielded, nitrogen filled hdmi cables with gold and unobtanium coated connectors if I REALLY want to get the best picture out of my new $400 tv. Fortunately they keep just the thing on the shelf, and I wouldn't cheap out.
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You know, the material of the shield doesn't matter when someone suggests it as a possibility.
FTFW (Score:2)
You know the material of the shield doesn't matter, when someone suggests it as a possibility.
we have very fast FPGA too (Score:3)
programmable gate arrays that can operate in the gigahertz. some specially made for networking
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that's so funny, the devices of this article don't exist yet and your touting the advanced features and superiority over existing commercial devices they will have. are you in marketing? or sales?
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They mean the transistors are programmable.
Xilinx, Altera, and others have made reprogrammable chips for years. This new technology could potentially provide a different/better/cheaper/faster way of making a FPGA, but it isn't anything brand new, just a different way of doing the same thing.
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An FPGA gate is basically just a lookup table for a logical function, stored in a tiny memory cell. Routing, etc. is also configured using memory (flip-flops). I would guess the magnetic transistor would at least make FPGAs less power hungry (no need to power the flip-flops), or they might allow the chip to be built from programmable transistors, rather than using lookup tables and dedicating part of the chip area to conventional memory and arithmetic circuitry.
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Re:Chips are "reprogrammable" (Score:5, Informative)
To keep a magnetic field going (small as it might be) you need to have a current flowing...
And that's why I have wires and batteries connected to all my fridge magnets...
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Re:Chips are "reprogrammable" (Score:4, Informative)
However, it could be possible to use magnetic nanoparticles to provide that magnetic field, which is the solution proposed in the second half of the article. A stronger-than-normal electric field could be used to rotate those magnets. The problem is that building such a structure is very difficult. A bottom-up nanotech approach combined with our current top-down lithography would introduce far too many contaminants. Trying to get a nanoparticle solution to go exactly where you want it is extremely difficult, especially due to the high surface forces that make nanoparticles like to stick to things. The difficulty of using a traditional top-down approach is making the nanoparticles able to rotate. There would need to be multiple types of resist used, likely, one to define the shape, and the other to be removed at the end to provide spacing during fabrication. The high surface forces as mentioned previously would also pose a big problem. Nanocrystals lack the stability given by long-range order and, especially with sub-10nm crystals, can have unique crystal structures due to this large stress. In order to mainain stability and not try to merge with neighboring crystals, there either needs to be an electrostatic barrier or physical barrier. Because it's impossible to keep something passively balanced with a electric or magnetic field, there would need to be the additional complexity of a pivot placed at the necessary angle. It's possible that something like graphene could be used to provide lubercatoin of the pivots, but this means that both the graphene and magnet would have to have compatible crystal structures so that the depostion growth grows with a known crystal orrientation (for knowing where to place the pivot).
On the other hand, this technology could be very useful with current technology in MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). A field of these transistors could be used to very accurately know the position of a magnet, in, say, an actuator, or on a spring for an accellerometer.
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You don't need a current to sustain the magnetic domain in something like a hard disk, which is the impression I get of what this technology is about.
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Re:Chips are "reprogrammable" (Score:5, Interesting)
You claim it is common, but has anyone ever released a CPU that changed dynamically? Rather than optimizing code for the CPU, optmize the CPU for the code. I see this being biggest in the area where ASICs are biggest, networking gear. Need more hardware encryption? Need more QoS profiles?
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EEPROMs as flash RAM or firmware is old, very old. But the idea of a processor being field reprogrammable *is* new. It's so new, nobody has anything that would benefit yet. Think of something like Cisco booting based off the startup config, then optimizing the processors based on the config.
Let's see if Cisco can "optimize" IOS to not crash because of stupid memory leaks & buffer overruns first :-)
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What might be interesting is having cores reprogram to a different CPU architecture for security specific code. For example, extremely security critical stuff is better off running on a Harvard architecture machine where code and data are stored separately. Done right, it would help stomp most basic issues with code.
It can also help to enforce security on virtual machines (JVM, Dalvik), to ensure that some software failure would not mean that the VM could be used as a stepping stone to gain a complete use
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It's so new, nobody has anything that would benefit yet.
I think more than a few people have ideas... here is one: a chip that can switch between AMD64 and ARMv8 instruction sets, even supporting both simultaneously...
I think the reality is that no big chip manufacturer wants such a thing to exist.. how is ARM going to get its licensing fee if you can just download the instruction set from the pirate bay?
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Never mind all the companies that released actual commercial hardware that uses these techniques.
Optimizing the CPU for code is something that is still being worked on, but even that has been going on for years.
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Even with boring general purpose CPU tasks, this could be useful. Say a machine is going idle, it would be able to re-pattern a core from high wattage and CPU to a more power saving design.
Taking this technology to software would allow CPU architectures to be used in tandem. For example, ARM executables could be run on the same die (not the same core) as x86. Or, if one is allowed to "import" old CPU architectures, one could have one core running a SPARC domain, a POWER LPAR, a couple VMs under vSphere,
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Not really. Magnetism trails off with the cube of the distance, rather than the square of the distance.
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Re:Chips are "reprogrammable" (Score:4, Informative)
If you can change the chip logic, you can get custom behaviours at top speed.
That's what we thought about FPGAs, but it didn't quite work out that way. Using this technology won't change that, it will just allow us to make better FPGAs.
Reprogramming an FPGA is slow (many switches to reconfigure, usually serially), which means it would only increase overal performance if you can use the custom function long enough, and it only works if you don't have to switch functions too often.
Writing software for an FPGA is difficult (it's more logic design than software) and requires specialized software. Reconfiguring it in a wrong way could damage the silicon (though modern devices and software have some protections and checks). So any custom functionality would come in the form of libraries, written by specialists.
The amount of extra interconnect and transistors needed to make a CPU reprogrammable are also significant, resulting in higher die area (and thus cost), lesser transistor density (=slower speed), and overall higher energy consumption.
The result of all this is that FPGAs are only used in very custom hardware (usually low volume), with the programming remaining largely static, only to be altered when there are bugs found or improvements needed (once a month or less).
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And there's no such thing as an FPGA with embedded FLASH? This sounds very much to me like scientists trying to find a solution to a non-problem using a basic method that has innate vulnerabilities that conventional technology does not have.
At the scales they mention in the article, you could have a whole lot of reconfigurable logic gates in the space that one cell of their prototype takes up. They haven't figured out how to miniaturize the cell to anything like modern semiconductor cells, let alone shiel
SPACE dammit! (Score:1)
Magnetic states aren't as easily harmed by cosmic rays, thanks to spin majorities. That's why MRAM (magnetic RAM) is good for space applications. Now just bring in the magnetic processors, courtesy of this new magnetic transistor switch, and you can have a robust system that's much more capable of standing upto the harsh radiation environment of outer space without suffering crashes and glitches that can jeopardize a mission.
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Of course it is magnetic states that are the key to core memory systems.... one of the earliest kind of computer memory systems.
Seriously, this whole suggestion sounds like what was once old is now new again. I'm sure there are some impressive miniaturization factors here and some interesting technology, but the "discovery" of magnetic memory is one of the oldest ideas in computer engineering. Voyager 2 is using one of the last operational core memory systems in the Solar System right now.... at least as
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No. The chip interprets a program, but in itself cannot do anything it was not designed to do at the factory. You can't add a new command (e.g. Assembly ops), and all commands need some form of hardware implementation to work (I'm not a chip designer, gross simplifications etc. etc.).
This would allow the chip to be reprogrammed, perhaps even by itself. For example, you could have a circuit do addition, but then change it so it does division. The closest we have to this right now would be field-programmable
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No. The chip interprets a program, but in itself cannot do anything it was not designed to do at the factory. You can't add a new command (e.g. Assembly ops), and all commands need some form of hardware implementation to work (I'm not a chip designer, gross simplifications etc. etc.).
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Sorry, but CPUs have had microprogrammed instruction codes for decades.
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Sorry, but microprogrammed instruction codes are still several layers above the transistor switch level.
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FPGAs essentially have "gates" that are not merely gates but small look up tables (LUTs), they also have storage elements, some dedicated arithmetic units for DSP (powerful ones do that), and a whole bunch of routing resources. If you want programmable logic of any sort, you'll need all that no matter what technology is used to reprogram the transistors. An FPGA usually has either internal or external configuration source (FLASH, a download from a CPU, etc.), and a volatile configuration storage that's atta
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The power consumption claims sound a lot more like plain old static ram, even older than 25 years.
In sleepy mode, a large sram draws a current low enough that there's no need to use anything bigger than a rechargeable AA battery, because the battery self draining current of an AA is already a multiple of the sram current so the battery will last almost as long as it would take to die on the shelf. Maybe shortening the "shelf life" by a couple hours or even a day.
Dallas Semiconductor makes a lot of interest
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Not sure you understand how a Faraday cage works - they are not powered.
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The whole field of spintronics is opening up and includes quantum computing. Here's an interesting article on a new 3D spintronic memory which could produce new memory chips 1000s or even 1000,000s of times denser that existing devices with high speeds and all the advantage mentioned in this article [pcpro.co.uk] mentioned about magnetic technologies.
theres more than one type of transistor (Score:4, Interesting)
one that requires voltage to keep it on, one that requires voltage to keep it off (P channel vs N channel FET's), ones that require current levels to keep it on and off (npn and pnp BJT's)
so to say
"First, keeping the voltage on requires power"
is a broad statement, yea something that uses power requires power
Then
"Second, transistors must be hard-wired into the chips and can't be reconfigured"
well yea, but we have long established configurations of transistors that can be reconfigured to suit needs, its called programable logic and spans the life of PAL's, GAL's, CLPD's, and upto FPGA's
so, what exactly are you trying to tell me other than magnets can drop power consumption since they have a physical state memory, we already know that from core memory.
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Except that the smaller geometry CMOS you use, the higher the leakage current. In modern CPUs, the leakage wastes on the order of 10% of power IIRC, perhaps even more. As you go down to single dozens of nanometres, the leakage takes over dynamic current consumption -- IIRC, of course.
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It's actually closer to half the power in current process technology, I believe. Obviously, that's a big enough problem that many things are done to mitigate it; for example, turning off power to parts of a chip that aren't in use. Or reduce voltage and slow down the clocks. Or even better, just finishing up as much work as possible, turn off the power to the whole chip for some amount of time, then wake up and take care of whatever needs doing (and do this all much faster than a human would even notice - s
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I think you can summarize this as we now have something that doesn't require physical changes (PROM) or large electrical fields (FLASH) to contain a state.
RAM used require some form of power; to keep current flowing you need a voltage difference and to keep a voltage difference on FETs there is still some current going because you need it to switch in less than eons.
Now all you need to do is build up a magnetic field (which still uses power) but then the state will remain for a considerable time without h
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you just discribed capacitive FRAM which has been around commercially for nearly a decade
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Sorry, I couldn't let this pass uncommented. Yeah, yeah, -1 Pedantic.
"one that requires voltage to keep it on, one that requires voltage to keep it off (P channel vs N channel FET's),"
The ones that need a voltage to stay on are enhancement-mode MOSFETs. The ones that need a voltage to stay off are depletion-mode FETs, either MOSFET or JFET. All of those come in N- and P-channel flavors. They're symmetrical other than for P-type having less mobility. (And thus being more tolerant of dirty processes, which is
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one that requires voltage to keep it on, one that requires voltage to keep it off (P channel vs N channel FET's), ones that require current levels to keep it on and off (npn and pnp BJT's)
so to say
"First, keeping the voltage on requires power"
is a broad statement, yea something that uses power requires power
And it's not TRUE either. Keeping charge on a buried gate requires no power. How the f*** does this guy think Flash?
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Don't FPGA chips require logic on top of transistors to function? This suggestion appears to make this unnecessary as transistor level hardware becomes reprogrammable without additional stuff on top.
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logic is made out of transistors
Yes, but the same will apply here. (Score:1)
FPGA's are about addressability of combinations. The finer the grain the more configuration and potential interconnect is needed to achieve flexibility.
Conversely, the larger the blocks are the more capacity can be fitted but the less combinations possible.
The cool part is possible efficiency savings - assuming it can also beat SRAM for speed and thereby get used right in the heart of processors.
The new function is MRAM - good for DRAM replacement. I don't see it beating flash any time soon simply on the
Huh. Sorta like the way living cells work. (Score:2)
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Exactly. For a decent 150nm process I think you can keep the leakage at microamps per a million transistors, or did I get that wrong? Alas, for a 30nm process, it's like 4-5 orders of magnitude worse.
IT IS CALLED CORE MOTHERFUCKERS !! (Score:2)
Core !! Old as the hills !! So old, it has come back around !! Probably some shit unix time wrap failure !!
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(magnetic) core memory is entirely different, because it only contains one bit of information (and requires crazy timings, plus you have to rewrite the data when you read it, quite fun...)
You have crazy timing and you have to rewrite the data when you read it from DRAM as well.
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Oh yes. A DDR3 device datasheet is more complex than that of quite a few peripheral chips from the 80s.
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Oh yes. A DDR3 device datasheet is more complex than that of quite a few peripheral chips from the 80s.
Yes. Quite a bit more complex. Today's devices have to cope with different power levels (suspend, hibernate, etc), their data busses are eight times as wide, and the address busses are also quite a bit wider. The clock timings are quite a bit tighter, etc.
Nevertheless, DDR3s, like all dynamic memory, requires refresh cycles and rewrite on read in order to maintain the data (in fact, all that a refresh cycle is is a read and rewrite session). These days, that is handled by control circuitry on the memo
Translation from journalist-speak (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a standard field effect transistor, except the gate can hold a magnetic charge on its own, with no voltage applied. You only need to apply a charge to change its state. It actually looks sort of like a flash cell, except as the gate of a transistor.
However, it's made with indium antimonide, which apparently doesn't work well with existing fabrication methods. And I have to wonder what the switching times on it would be - if it can handle the multi-gigahertz frequencies in modern processors.
The whole "reconfigurable" bit is journalist bullshit. Pay no attention to it.
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>However, it's made with indium antimonide, which apparently doesn't work well with existing fabrication methods.
So it's dead then.
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>However, it's made with indium antimonide, which apparently doesn't work well with existing fabrication methods.
So it's dead then.
Yep, slashdotted in one fell swoop. This is the place where great ideas go to die.
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And in the next seven years, it isn't going to be indium antimonide gates. PCM might make a showing if you're lucky.
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In modern small geometry chips, the leakage current starts to drive thermal/power performance, last I heard :( So no, you don't need very little current. Yeah, maybe per transistor, but you get a billion of them, and suddenly leakage plays a major role even if the clocks are stopped.
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In the indium antimonide device, the retained state is stored magnetically. In the HP titanium dioxide device state is held by the movement of oxygen ions. There are many memristor devices that use different mechanisms to store state, including magnetic spin. Check the Wikipedia article for details.
Besides memory, one of the uses for the HP style of memristor is configuration of FPGAs. If this works it would shrink the size of FPGA cell
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Even if journalism bullshit at the moment, it would be really cool if one day actual reconfigurable chips where available. Imagine downloading the configuration for the next Intel chip, and applying it onto the same board as the previous gen. Or maybe even on-the-fly reconfiguring capabilities, such that certain parts of the processor change to suit the needs of instructions currently executing. Maybe part of the processor can work as a GPU if you are gaming, and as a multithreaded-optimized config if you n
CMOS (Score:2)
First, keeping the voltage on requires power, which drives up the energy consumption of the microchip.
Barely. Almost every digital chip out there uses CMOS [wikipedia.org] logic. The whole point of CMOS logic is that, when the gates aren't switching, no current flows. That means that no power is drawn. In practice, a little bit of current leaks, but this is a small effect at all but the smallest process sizes.
It's not all clear from the abstract how the authors expect to maintain a magnetic field without any static power consumption. Perhaps using ferromagnets, but I wouldn't hold my breath -- MRAM still hasn't happen
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Sure, very little current flows through the transistor's gate. But, the transistors themselves are imperfect switches, and so you get some current flowing from Vdd to Vss all the time anyway. For the products I tend to work on, around half or more of the power consumption comes from leakage, amazingly.
For the uninitiated: CMOS gates consist of a pair of complementary switches. One set connects Vdd (the positive voltage indicating a logic '1') to the output node, and the other set connects Vss or GND (th
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Exactly. And when you get a billion of those imperfect leaky transistors on a chip, suddenly a big chunk of power gets wasted right there -- to a point where not only you can't ignore it, but it defines the limits of what you can achieve. Leakage is a big problem these days.
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TI has a working implementation of FRAM, they use it in their ultra-low-power MCUs.
FRAM Technology Overview
Welcome to the future of embedded memory
As the world demands faster and higher performance in every application, new memory technology is needed to enable smarter solutions. FRAM from Texas Instruments provides unified memory with dynamic partitioning and memory access speeds 100 times faster than flash. FRAM is also capable of zero power state retention in all power modes, which means that writes are guaranteed, even in the event of a power loss. And with a write endurance of over 100 trillion cycles, EEPROM is no longer required. All of this is possible at less than 100A/MHz active power consumption – a first for the semiconductor industry.
http://www.ti.com/mcu/docs/mcuproductcontentnp.tsp?familyId=1751§ionId=95&tabId=2840&family=mcu [ti.com]
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Mod parent up, please.
Reprogrammable Memristors (Score:2)
We gonna have some real smart robots someday.
This article is almost 100% weasel words. (Score:1)
This article is almost 100% weasel words. Of course, just like optical computers and 3d storage cubes, it's 5-10 years away, right?
Jeez.
Hereby Making Possible the True Apocalypse (Score:1)
Remember all those post-apocalyptic shows in which a giant EMP reverts the world to a technological wasteland?
Put this these in all our electronics and we might get to find out what that's like.
Frances Hellman was onto this years ago... (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEof8E2cF8o
Back then I was thinking of how this could overcome the heating problem we would get if we could change the characteristics of each transistor in a 3D layered transistor array. Imagine having a FPGA with 10x10x10 layers, all cross addressable and connectable, Diagonally as well as parallel.
Magnetic? So that means.... (Score:1)
... you can brick a computer if you get it to near a large magnet.... like a speaker?.
REALLY? (Score:1)
use a tiny voltage to toggle between 'on' and 'off.'
LOL
Electronics 101: Transistors are current switched devices.
transistors must be hard-wired into the chips
LOL
That comment just speaks for itself. Friggin softies.
Flip-Flops (Score:1)