Physicists Receive $1.85 Million Grant to Reinvent Electronic Computing

Posted 10/05/2011 at 11:24am | by Paul Lilly

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Talk about a monumental task. Roland Kawakami, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, is leading a team of physicists on a multicampus research project aimed at replacing conventional silicon electronics with a new way of computing better equipped to process large scale applications. The team's budget is $1.85 million.

That's the amount of grant money it received, according to UC Riverside. It was awarded to UC Riverside for winning the national Nanoelectronics for 2020 and Beyond competition.

Kawakami says his team is looking at ways of improving computing that go beyond simply building a better transistor. He believes conventional silicon electronics can only go so far and it won't be long before the technology hits a wall. Then what?

"Our approach is to utilize the spin degree of freedom to store and process information, which will allow the functions of logic and memory to be fully integrated into a single chip," Kawakami explains.

It starts with developing a new type of building block device called a magnetologic gate (pictured above). This will serve as the basis for the technology, much in the same way transistors are the backbone of conventional electronics. The magnetic gate is made of graphene with a bunch of magnetic electrodes. These electrodes store data, while electrons move through the graphene to use the spin state to compare the information, according to UC Riverside.

More geeky details on the topic here.