Spintronics Technology May Cool the Laptop

Does your laptop sometimes get so hot that it can almost be used to fry eggs? New technology may help cool it and give information technology a unique twist, says Jairo Sinova, a professor of physics from Texas University. Sinova and colleagues from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham have had their research published in the renowned journal Nature Physics.

Laptops are getting increasingly powerful, but as their sizes are getting smaller they are heating up, so how to deal with excessive heat becomes a headache. The crux of the problem is the way information is processed. Laptops and some other devices use flows of electric charge to process information, but they also produce heat. Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop. This also wastes a considerable amount of energy. Is there a solution?

One approach may be found in Sinova’s research – an alternative way to process information. The research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect. The directions they spin can be used to record and process information. To process information, it is necessary to create information, transmit the information and read the information. How these are done is the big question. The device the researchers designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information the scientists want to process, and then they transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally the researchers are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce.

The biggest challenge to creating a spin-based device is the distance that the spins will survive in a particular direction. Transmission is no problem. You can think for comparison that if the old devices could only transmit the information to several hundred feet away, with the new device, information can be easily transmitted to hundreds of miles away. It is very efficient.

Talking about its practical application, Sinova is very optimistic. This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential. One huge thing is that it is operational at room temperature, which nobody has been able to achieve until now. It may bring in a new and much more efficient way to process information.

14. Ask questions to the text making an outline of it.

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Part C

18. Look through the following text, define the information presented in it and entitle the text.

Text C

As opposed to traditional electronics, which uses the charge of the electron, spintronics uses the electron’s “spin” and manipulates the spin orientation. An electron’s sense of rotation is represented by a spin that either points up or down. In magnetic material the spin orientation of the electron can be used to store information to a semiconductor, so that the information stored can be processed in spin-based electronic components.

The use of spintronics technology could revolutionize the electronics and computing industries by making it possible to store vast amounts of data in much smaller devices than is currently possible.

The development of a silicon-based device that works at room temperature is a breakthrough for two reasons: first, silicon is the prevalent material in modern electronics production; and second, until now scientists have only been able to demonstrate control of electron spin at low temperatures that are not everyday use.

The demonstration of information exchange between a magnetic material and a semiconductor at room temperature is a positive step in the development of spintronics technology. If the new technology takes off it would mean huge energy savings because reversing the “electronic spin” would require less power than the normal electronic charge.

19. Say where the information presented in the text can be used.

20. Prove that spintronics could mean big energy savings.