A research team at the University of Tokyo (Japan) has reached an impressive milestone in the field of semiconductors. And, as he has collected Nikkeihas developed a device capable of processing information 1,000 times faster than the current most advanced CPU. It seems like science fiction, it’s true, but it’s not. It’s just science. Of course, this is frontier science. And the non-volatile quantum switching device that these scientists have developed uses quantum physics to carry out its purpose.
Most strikingly, this device represents bits using the magnetic properties of electrons rather than the flow of electricity itself, which is what the integrated circuits we are familiar with do. In fact, its capabilities lie precisely in this strategy. Current semiconductor technology It takes about a nanosecond to register a single bit before overheating becomes a critical issue.
However, this innovative device processes one bit of information in just 40 picoseconds. In practice this means that you invest one thousandth of the time in this process that conventional methods require. Interestingly, it combines tantalum and manganin to convert electrical signals into magnetic information, so its composition is very different from that of the silicon chips that reside inside our electronic devices.
Heat is no longer a problem
Laboratory tests carried out by researchers at the University of Tokyo have yielded surprising results. In their ingenious device, an electrical signal passes through the tantalum layer, so that the device registers that signal in the manganin in the form of the direction of a tiny magnetic force. Precisely this address represents a single bit without depending on the continuous flow of electric current.
Its performance improves as components become physically smaller
During the first tests, this device has worked completely stable even after processing information more than 100,000 million times. However, these Japanese researchers have verified that their performance improves as components become physically smaller. For this reason, if this technology finally makes it out of the laboratory, it could reduce energy consumption when processing information to just one hundredth of current levels.
Here’s another impressive fact: this device has processed information 100,000 million times without making a mistake. However, a current CPU or GPU would have overheated after just 10 million clock cycles if it had run at a similar speed. There is no doubt that it is a notable achievement. Be that as it may, we cannot ignore that moving this technology from the laboratory to a chip factory is a real challenge in the field of engineering.
The physics works, as these Japanese scientists have shown, but large-scale manufacturing poses challenges that are not present in a single device produced in a university laboratory. Even so, Disruptive technologies are usually born this wayso although the future of this innovation is uncertain, there is a possibility that it will manage to leave the laboratory and reach the chip manufacturing plants. The prototype is planned for 2030. Fingers crossed.
Image | Satoru Nakatsuji (University of Tokyo)
More information | Nikkei
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