15th Aug2011

Proposed Battery-less Computing with Spintronics and Straintronics

by Skibs

Researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University detailed a circuit design whose energy requirements were so low, no battery would be required. This new scheme combines spintronics and straintronics to achieve a processor which could operate on environmental energy alone.

Spintronics are used to store binary information with electrons, where an electron spinning one way constitutes as ‘0’ and the opposite direction a ‘1’. From here, straintronics are used to flip the direction of an electron’s spin with a miniscule amount of dissipated energy. Each switch could be performed with as little as 0.4 attojoules (4E-19 joules).

[Source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-strain-enable-ultra-low-energy.html]