Researchers develop new device to start computers instantaneously

A new device developed by researchers has opened up the possibility of starting computers start in a flash, with the click of a button.

Computers today encode data using electric currents with computer memory technology, a major limiting factor for reliability and shrinkability, and the source of significant power consumption.

However, if data could rather be encoded without current, by an electric field across an insulator, it would require much less energy and make low-power, instant-on computing a ubiquitous reality.

Cornell University researchers led by postdoctoral associate John Heron have made a breakthrough in the direction with a room-temperature magnetoelectric memory device.

Equivalent to one computer bit, it exhibited the holy grail of next-generation nonvolatile memory: magnetic switchability, in two steps, with electric field alone.

According to Heron, the advantage was low energy consumption.It requires a low voltage current to switch it. Heron added, devices that used currents consumed more energy and dissipated a significant amount of energy in the form of heat. That is what heated up computers and drained their batteries.

The device had been made by researchers out of a compound called bismuth ferrite because of its magnetic properties, www.designntrend.com reported.

Another advantage of the novel device was that it required less power to operate.

The switching properties came as a major discovery in the bismuth ferrite device, which used a spin transfer torque for its magnetic switching. Due its ferroelectric nature, the device could be switched using an electric field.

Typically ferroic materials are only one polarity, not both, and the polarities worked against each other.

The researchers also found that the switching of polarity in bismuth ferrite occurred in two steps.

According to Darrell Schlom, a professor of industrial chemistry in the department of materials science and engineering at Cornell, one-step switching would not have worked, and for that reason theorists had earlier thought what they had achieved was impossible.

According to Heron, ever since multiferroics came back to life around 2000, achieving electrical control of magnetism at room temperature had been the goal.

Other materials had similar properties, but only worked at extremely low temperatures. As it turned out, bismuth ferrite worked at room temperature, he added.

The research was published in the journal Nature.