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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

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.

ZME Science [zmescience.com]

[Journal Reference]: Advanced Materials [doi.org]

Original Submission