Mechanical advantage
Jul 14th 2011 | from the print edition
WHEN baking a cake it helps to have all the ingredients within reach, rather than wasting time and energy making frequent trips to the pantry. Something similar is true of the logic circuits in computers’ microprocessors. These could be made faster, and would consume less energy, if they were able to store information themselves instead of fetching it from separate memory chips or hard drives.
The problem is that the transistors used to make logic circuits hold their electronic state, and therefore any data they contain, only when powered up. The choice engineers face is thus between supplying continuous power to a transistor, so that it can retain its memory (which costs energy), and ferrying data that would otherwise be lost to and from so-called non-volatile memory devices that do not require continuous power (which costs time). Cracking this problem—so that transistors can act as their own non-volatile memory—would make all computers faster. It would be particularly valuable, though, for mobile devices. These could be made smaller and lighter, since they would require fewer components. And they could go for longer between charges.
To this end, Hiroshi Mizuta of the University of Southampton, in England, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba, Japan, are proposing a marriage between two novel types of transistor that could hardly be more different. One, the atomic transistor, draws on the latest advances in nanoscience. The other, the mechanical transistor, sounds as if it has been lifted from the annals of the industrial revolution.
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