The last time I touched on spintronics was a little more than a year ago. That article references a few other articles I’ve penned on the subject going back a couple years.

Researchers at the University of Delaware have put a “spin” in silicon, as reported in one of the world’s foremost scientific journals, Nature. This is the first time this has ever been done.

Although this is a revolutionary step to spintronic computing, what does it mean? Well crudely put, say you’re looking for a simple binary yes-or-no answer. In a common semiconductor chip today, if you send three balls from point A to B, the answer is yes; if you send 10 balls, the answer is no.

But because of current loss, interference and any other number of possible interruptions, the sender has to send five balls from A to B. B receives five balls and then has to figure out (through programs, system architecture, etc.) whether too many balls were sent to make up for any possible losses or if five balls were lost. All the energy and supplemental systems take up increasing amounts of energy, not including the energy that’s necessary to send 10+ balls from point A to B, even though you may only need energy to send three balls most of the time.

In a spintronic setting, you’d send one ball from A to B every time; it would be blue if it was yes
and red if it was no. The architecture is significantly simplified, and the energy use is slashed dramatically. That means you can either maintain the energy input and exponentially increase computing capacity or maintain computing capacity and use exponentially less power.

Either way, this is revolutionary stuff. Plus, information stored spintronically is about as stable and hearty as memory and processing gets.

In broad terms, this allows Moore’s Law to continue, just as many people were wondering whether we were soon going to hit a technological wall. Imagine global computing and manufacturing hitting that kind of performance wall in economic terms.

Granted, we’re probably a decade off from rolling these out, but crossing this threshold is significant. It’s a bit geeky today, I grant you, but mark this down and look back a decade or so from now and see how the world has changed.

Here’s an excellent article on the University of Delaware achievement.

GS Early is editor of Nanotech Investor News and The Real Nanotech Investor.