Spintronics to Eliminate Standby Power Waste
Spintronics To Eliminate Standby Power Waste
Read how spintronics memory chips will eventually cut power wasted in standby mode
energy efficiency | news | generalAppliances left on
standby constantly use power - in some cases a lot of power - which is responsible for up to
10% of domestic electricity consumption in some homes.
Even the latest '
energy efficient' electrical products still burn through a not insignificant amount of power on standby since the electronics they contain need to be kept energised to retain data in memory to enable quick startup when the user wants to restart a device. This is the bottleneck which has prevented
standby power consumption being eliminated.
Introduction to Spintronics
Spintronics is an emerging technology which enables an intrinsic property of electrons (their
Spin) to be used to store data instead of using the electrons as a whole. Traditional memory chips store data by putting electrons into voids or removing them - the presence of an electron in a void signifies a binary 1, and the absence a binary 0. Spintronics chips uses tiny
magnets to change the polarisation (spin) of electrons -
spin up signifying a binary 1 and
spin down a binary 0. This means that a spintronics memory chip can store twice as much data per electron.
Traditional memory chips (pictured above) need to move electrons around - pushed by electricity which generates heat requiring cooling which uses further electricity. Changing the
spin of an electron (from
spin up to
spin down or visa versa) uses
less power and generates much
less heat.
Spintronics memory chips can therefore have electrons packed much closer together than in traditional chips since overheating will not be an issue giving us smaller chips using less power and storing more data.
Spintronics Memory Chips to Eliminate Standby Power
Spintronics memory chips use
zero power to retain data unlike traditional memory chips since electrons will retain their spin orientation when the magnetic field which set it is not present. Therefore spintronics memory chips have promised to eliminate the need for standby power, but until now this was just theoretical.
Electronics giant
NEC together with
Tohaku University in Japan reported (June 13th 2011) a breakthrough which is a big step toward getting commercial spintronics memory chips available to appliance manufacturers. NEC claim they have successfully made the world's first
content addressable memory (CAM) system using spintronics. This prototype (pictured above) still requires very low temperatures to operate, but with further development the aim to to get this working at room temperatures.
Spintronics memory chips will be as fast as RAM, but retain data when the power is cut like flash memory - offering the best of both worlds.
More Information
Click here to read the official
NEC Spintronics Press Release on their prototype
spin-CAM chip.
Article Last Modified: 11:39, 15th Jun 2011Comment on this Article
If you have any comments on this article, please email them to
neil@reuk.co.uk.
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