Spintronics

[belovelife]

spintronics

 

wikipedia

 

Is there any ideas about this topic.

[Moontanman]

It does look like a significant amount of research is bing done in this direction but it's out side my area of knowledge. Your links were informative

[alexander]

well this all depends on what you are looking for for ideas?

 

its an interesting field, yes, it is driving technology, what else do you want to know...?

[CraigD]

Spintronics is a catchy term describing nearly any technology that uses electron spin – I’ve not seen a good history of the term, but suspect it was coined by IBM researchers in the mid 1990s, or perhaps a bit earlier.

 

As best I can tell, the field can be broken down into 3 basic categories according to how commonly its implemented in actual devices: nearly everywhere; rare; and nonexistent.

 

“Nearly everywhere” spintronics are implemented mostly in the read heads of disk drives. Nearly every disk drive manufactured since 2000 has used a GMR read head, along with some TMR heads. From the early 1990s to 1998, AMR heads were most common. Much prior to that, and read heads were inductive heads, built essentially like microphones – a iron core wrapped in as many winds of thin insulated wire as possible, or the equivalent made using chipmaking techniques, connected to an amplifier. In those days – the late 1980s – 1 GB of storage typically required a rack of a dozen or so harddrives in a permanent piece of computer room furniture the size of a small refrigerator. A typical PC had about 100 MB (0.1 GB). These days, full-bay (desktop PC) hard drives using GMR and TMR heads with 1TB (1,000 GB) or more can be had for about $100, and smaller drives (laptops) using the same technology can be had with 320 GB. The main reason for these huge increases – about a factor or 10,000 - are spintronics in read heads.

 

“Rare” spintronics are MRAMs. They exist in the lab in the form of could-be-installed-ordinary-hardware chips, but are yet to perform significantly better than combinations of existing DRAM, SRAM, and non-volatile memory like flash to justify their cost. This situation could change soon.

 

“Nonexistent” spintronics are instant-on, ultra-low-power ultra-miniature machines with PC or better processing and storage that could be built into clothing or jewelry. Such gadgets aren’t in principle impossible using spintronic devices, but whether they can actually be made, or if they are made, whether something resembling present-day spintronics will be the most important technology in them, is uncertain. Storing information in electron spin is not the only, or necessary the best possible future technology, and what will actually be most successful is hard to guess.

 

So, to recap, spintronics have been in disk drives since 1991, will possibly in memories and processors in the coming months or years, and in stuff unlike anything we’ve yet seen … who know when, or if?

[alexander]

on MRAM, its not that it doesnt perform, its that the current capacities of mram are not comporable to what is actually needed... i dont disagree that this is a great technology, but i think the use of mram is somewhat limited, it should be a different component from ram in a system, and OSes should address it differently :)

 

64 megabits (8 megabytes) is not a whole lot, but you can store key info there, and an os that properly utilizes that should be able to load in like under 10 seconds after the first boot :)