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- Just when it seemed mobile phones and laptop computers
could not get smaller or lighter, British scientists have invented a microchip
that promises to revolutionise the world of portable electronics by virtually
doing away with the need for heavy batteries.
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- In a breakthrough which could give ultra-light mobiles
computing power far in excess of today's most souped-up desktop PC, British
scientists have made a chip which uses magnetism instead of electricity
to process data.
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- As well as packing a greater data processing punch, magnetic
chips require a fraction of the power used by silicon chips.
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- The bulky batteries used by today's laptop computers
could be replaced by watch batteries. "It's a completely new type
of microchip," said Russsell Cowburn, who developed the technology
with Mark Welland at Cambridge university. "We're the first to demonstrate
anything like this working at room temperature.
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- "Computers developed using magnetic microchips will
need much less power to work. The days of carrying around heavy batteries
for laptop computers and mobile phones will be numbered."
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- Other labs around the world, looking ahead to the day
about a 10 years away when it will be impossible to crowd more transistors
onto silicon chips, have tried to fashion magnetic ones. But they have
only been able to make them work at a fraction of a degree above absolute
zero.
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- Shirt pocket computers and mobiles small enough to fit
into the palm of the hand are already commonplace, but their processing
power and battery life is limited.
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- "Mobile phones will soon need to have a lot more
computing power on board," said Dr Cowburn.
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- "It's a question of packing more computer power
into the same space so you can use the internet."
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- What the Cambridge team has done is to create a magnetic
transistor one ten millionth of a metre across, consisting of a nickel-iron
dot.
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- This basic building block of the new chip could one day
be 40,000 times smaller than its silicon equivalent, making it possible
to squeeze 250 bn transistors into a square centimetre.
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- Fizzing with electricity, silicon chips gobble up power
and generate heat. They use millions of voltage fluctations to "think".
In the new chip, millions of sub-microscopic magnets "think"
by continually switching polarity, requiring only a little battery power
to feed in data and extract the results.
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- The Cambridge team, whose research is published in the
latest edition of the journal Science, has patented its discovery, but
commercial exploitation is about 10 years away. It took Cowburn and Welland
three years to develop their minute magnetic dots and the means to control
them. The magnetic chip relies on the peculiarities of quantum physics
- the weird physical behaviour of matter and energy at the atomic level.
It would not work if it were any bigger.
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- The magnetic chip is the most advanced of a range of
exotic technologies looking to make ever tinier, ever more powerful computers
once silicon has reached its limits. Other scientists are working towards
light-based computers, quantum computers built from individual atoms, and
biological computers.
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- Dr Cowburn said the brains of future computers could
be hybrid chips - part magnetic, part biological and part light-based.
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