Science News
“Multiferroics are promising candidates for new type of memory and logic circuits”
Date : 04-Feb-2019
Single crystals of the multiferroic material bismuth-iron-oxide. The bismuth atoms (blue) form a cubic lattice with oxygen atoms (yellow) at each face of the cube and an iron atom (gray) near the center. The somewhat off-center iron interacts with the oxygen to form an electric dipole (P),. The collective magnetic spins of the atoms in the material encode the binary bits 0 and 1.
Credit: Ramamoorthy Ramesh lab, UC Berkeley
The magneto-electric spin-orbit or MESO devices will also pack five times more logic operations into the same space than CMOS, continuing the trend toward more computations per unit area, a central tenet of Moore's Law. The new devices will boost technologies that require intense computing power with low energy use, specifically highly automated, self-driving cars and drones, both of which require ever increasing numbers of computer operations per second. In the new MESO devices, the binary bits are the up-and-down magnetic spin states in a multiferroic, "The discovery was that there are materials where you can apply a voltage and change the magnetic order of the multiferroic," said Ramesh, The researchers report that they have reduced the voltage needed for multiferroic magneto-electric switching from 3 volts to 500 millivolts, and predict that it should be possible to reduce this to 100 millivolts: one-fifth to one-tenth that required by CMOS transistors in use today. Lower voltage means lower energy use: the total energy to switch a bit from 1 to 0 would be one-tenth to one-thirtieth of the energy required by CMOS.
Reference : Abdelrahman Z. Al-Attili, Daniel Burt, Zuo Li, Naoki Higashitarumizu, Frederic Y. Gardes, Katsuya Oda, Yasuhiko Ishikawa, Shinichi Saito. Germanium vertically light-emitting micro-gears generating orbital angular momentum. Optics Express, 2018; 26 (26): 34675 DOI: 10.1364/OE.26.034675