Spintronics Research Paper

Even a gradual approach will push prices up. Modern fabs are already eye-wateringly expensive: Intel recently cancelled one with costs rumoured to have topped $5 billion. If raw speed is vital, a customer might be willing to pay more for exotic, high-speed chips, says Linley Gwennap, who runs the Linley Group. But for many products, like midrange smartphones, that will not make sense. All the big chipmakers intend to keep shrinking their circuits until at least 2020 or so, but if that is at the expense of rapidly rising production costs, then economics could bring the curtain down on Moore’s law before physics does.

Even if that does happen, it need not be the end of faster computers. “Fifty years of Moore’s law has made the industry fat,

Several firms, including Intel, are investigating an idea called spintronics, in which the “spin” of subatomic particles—a quantum-mechanical property that bears little relation to the classical notion of spin—is used to perform computation. Spintronics offers much lower power consumption, and brings other advantages too. Some spintronic devices may be able to do more logical work with a given number of components than traditional chips can manage. That could allow machines to be built from fewer devices. A typical adder, one subcomponent of a modern chip, is built from around 30 separate transistors, says Intel’s Dr Mayberry. A spintronic one could be built from just five, allowing more computational power to be packed into a given

First proposed by Carver Mead, a computer scientist, in the 1980s, it looks to biology for inspiration. Biological brains are different from silicon computers in fundamental ways, says Dr Guha at IBM. Computers are electronic devices, whereas brains rely on a mixture of electricity and chemistry. The fundamental information-processing unit of the brain, the neuron, can be connected to thousands of other neurons, whereas a typical transistor connects to just a handful of peers. A transistor may switch on and off billions of times a second; neurons fire around a million times slower. Neurons can make or break connections on the fly, allowing brains to adapt themselves to a task, while the wiring of most silicon chips is