Researchers from IBM will be announcing a breakthrough in the field of spintronics this week, in the journal Nature, reports Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian. (A “huge” breakthrough, no less.) Spintronics is short for “spin transport electronics.”
Though it may sound like an outmoded style of breakdancing, spintronics could actually be the future of computing. The basic idea behind spintronics is to use an electron’s spin--up or down--to encode a one or a zero. The spin of the electrons can then be used to encode data.
This is all well and good in theory, but the problem is that electrons typically can only hold their spin for 100 picoseconds, or 100 trillionths of a second. A 1 GHz processor can’t possibly cycle that fast, so you couldn’t use the electrons’ spin for computing.
But what if you could extend how long electrons hold their spin? That’s exactly what IBM Research and the Solid State Physics Laboratory at ETH Zurich say they’ve done. They were able to stretch out electrons’ spin time by a factor of 30, to 1.1 nanoseconds. A 1 GHz processor can cycle in that amount of time.
To read more, click here.