New Logic: The Attraction of Magnetic Computation ICT Results (07/07/08)
as it appeared in the July 11, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
The EU-funded MAGLOG project sought to adapt magnetoelectronic technology, which takes advantage of the magnetic properties of electrons and their charge, for logic operations, including memory, data storage, and computation. "The main goal of MAGLOG was to show that magnetic logic gates could be produced on a conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor [CMOS] platform," says MAGLOG project coordinator Guenter Reiss. "For successful commercialization, it is critical that this novel method of data processing can be integrated into conventional chip technologies." Lithographic etching of structures within ferromagnetic material to create zones where the material's magnetic orientation can switch between states in response to input signals is one successful production approach. Another approach employs magnetic tunneling junctions that are assembled from alternating layers of ferromagnetic materials and insulators, resulting in a programmable logic gate. This property could enable chip designers to fabricate generic chips that can then be tailored via logic gate programming. Magnetic logic can facilitate greater efficiency because magnetoelectronic components are generally less power-consumptive than conventional microprocessor elements, while their non-volatility can lower chip consumption even further. Click Here to View Full Article
