Physicists in the United States have just announced a major breakthrough after they literally put a new spin on one of the greatest inventions in history: the transistor. The scientists made an entirely novel switching device called a magneto-electric transistor that uses 5% less energy than conventional semiconductor transistors, while potentially reducing the number of transistors needed to store data by as much as 75%.
[...] It was by looking at these demand problems and the physical constraints of the conventional transistor that Dowben and colleagues reckoned that they had to come up with something that works fundamentally differently. Eventually, they figured out how to make an electric-magnetic transistor.
Here’s how it works. Instead of leveraging the switching of the flow of electrons through a circuit, the electric-magnetic transistor uses a fundamental property of electrons called spin, which can point either up or down. The orientation of a particle’s spin can be manipulated using, you’ve guessed it, magnetism.
[Journal Reference]: Advanced Materials
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202105023
(Score: 3, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 15 2022, @12:38PM (3 children)
First thought was, whatever happened to memristors? Reading up on that, I learned that HP's big announcement almost a decade ago that they'd soon have commercial memristor devices has yet to pan out. And there's talk that maybe, no such device can exist.
In recent times, the biggest such embarrassments were cold fusion and stem cells.
So, "spin transistors"? Maybe call them spinsistors? Spinstors??
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 15 2022, @02:57PM (1 child)
Back in the 1970s, I remember when Intel's Magnetic Bubble memory was going to be the next fantastic thing.
Also the Josephson Junction.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday April 15 2022, @08:42PM
Josephson junction was a pretty good tech. Except that having to refrigerate to cryogenic temperatures made development too slow to keep up with conventional room-temperature electronics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2022, @01:25AM
Memristor memory has two of the worst properties of Flash and DRAM in that it has a limited write lifetime and is erased on read. That is an ugly combination. There is also a 'sneak path' problem that causes trouble for larger arrays. IIUC this like the multi-keypress problem common in keyboards but adding diodes isn't enough to fix it.
From wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReRAM [wikipedia.org]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2022, @04:10PM
'tis funny. we have a "ground" or "ground plane" since, well, the ground is everywhere and mostly under our feet. with pv-transistors we can have a "sky" or "sky plane" too, since, well, the sky is also everywhere above our heads. thus the singular bright spot in the sky becomes the signal giver.
this will allow variable output manufacturing. you won't have to go outside, since if the conveyor belt runs slow, u will know that there's cloud cover and maybe rain and if it's running fast u know that somebody might be getting sunburn. all thanks to the "sky plane" ... (also, no work after dark, weeeh).
ofc die hard kapitalist just got the morsel in the wrong pipe and coughing something fearze now. i mean how dare they try to limited the energy and resource input to their dragon couldron (factory) having to run full steam and flat out for ... profit (and doom).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2022, @05:25PM (1 child)
Science used to be about understanding the nature of reality, or some such idealistic garbage. Now it's about meeting shareholder expectations, or advancing leadership priorities. Or some such non-idealistic garbage. Bah! Lawn.... OFF!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2022, @06:38PM
Our highly sophisticated nanotechnology product is 10% more efficient... meh.
(Score: 2) by jb on Saturday April 16 2022, @04:51AM (1 child)
"Mangeto-electric" sounds very much like "electromagnetic".
The electromagnetic equivalent to a transistor is of course a relay.
So, is this really a funky new type of transistor, or have these guys finally figured out how to miniaturise relays to the same extent as transistors (which would be just as impressive) ...?
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday April 16 2022, @12:17PM
Not exactly. The magnetic fields aren't used to control the flow of electrical current the way an electromagnetic relay does but the quantum-mechanical spins of the electrons in the transistor itself. Spin-½ particles (e.g. electrons, protons, and most matter particles) have what appears to be an intrinsic angular momentum that manifests as a magnetic moment when it's a charged particle like an electron, which can be in one of two states, up or down (more or less... read on later). A properly applied magnetic field can be used to manipulate the spins. I take it they're keeping things simple and classical and keeping the electrons in just definitely one of these two spin states, and not trying to do the funky business of maintaining superposition states (where the electron would be in some sense both spin up and spin down) that would be needed to do quantum computing, though in theory this might lay the groundwork for that kind of thing.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.