18th Century Pigment to Revolutionize Chip Design? 100
Scarlet X writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered a possible nonvolatile magnetic semiconductor and are investigating its use for 'spintronics,' an emerging technology that is concerned with manipulating and controlling the charge, flow and magnetism of electrons. The possibilities for the material 'cobalt green,' a paint developed by American Revolution era artists, as a spintronics material is exciting. Should the magnetic properties of the paint at room-temperature prove able to reliably control the wild spinning of excited electrons in a processor, not only could the size of processors reduce substantially, but the constant limiting factor, how to keep things cool, could disappear."
Re:Room temperature != operational temperature. (Score:4, Informative)
Cobalt green availability (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Room temperature != operational temperature. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cobalt green availability (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Room temperature != operational temperature. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can we now paint our own CPUs? (Score:3, Informative)
Someone like Chinese micro-painter Jin Yin Hua [bbc.co.uk] who has painted an image of a giant panda on a single human hair could really do it justice.
However for simpler curcuits it could be good to do.
I personally would prefer to put this ink into an inkjet printer and get better results.
Spintronics (Score:5, Informative)
This research has been going on for a long time - you may have heard of it here [slashdot.org] and it's likely going to take a while before we see it since it still needs to be perfected and then economical and make its way into industry. As far as I can tell by reading the UWNews article, all they did was discover that an old pigment can work. Not that it isn't cool, but it's not really likely to advance science significantly, especially because a previous article in PRL [google.com] which was published in 2004 mentions this effect.
American Era artists? (Score:3, Informative)
Shameless copy from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
While the timeframe is correct, the sentence in the posting (to me) suggests it's an american invention...
Sorry for the slightly off-topic, non-american-centric post. Now please continue enjoying your duplicates^H^H^H^H^Hexiting new stories and comments ;).
Re:Room temperature != operational temperature. (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, during the transistion there are nanoseconds where it is in the partially conducting state. Both the current and voltage are at intermediate values, and the power dissipation rises. The more often they switch, the more often these losses occur, which is why CPU heat is dependant on the operating frequency.
Spintronics may use a fundamentally differnt signalling mechanism which doesnt involve these transition losses.
Cobalt Green was not developed by artists (Score:2, Informative)
The preparation of zinc oxide at the end of the eighteenth century made the development of cobalt green, also known as zinc green, possible.
The Swedish chemist, Rinmann is credited with developing a process for making a compound of cobalt and zinc in 1780 that he published with the Stockholm Academy of Sciences. Arthur Herbert Church published Rinmann's process in his book, The Chemistry of Paints and Painting. According to Church, cobalt green was made with the compounds of oxides of zinc and cobalt by mixing them "with an alkaline carbonate" and then exposing the mixture to strong heat. After washing the sediment that resulted, the pigment was ready to grind. The pigment was always bluish-green in spite of the ability to widely vary the proportion of zinc to cobalt oxides in production. The compound that is formed is chemically joined.
Cobalt green was a semi-transparent, moderately bright green. Most sources cited considered it to be absolutely permanent as most pigments produced at high temperatures are. However, tests made in 1847 and published in 1910 showed a browning of the color in full-strength and a fading of it when mixed with lead white. The colormaker, Blockx, added that the date of the tests bears certainty that the green was made by Rinmann's process,
Artists did not favor cobalt green although it could safely be mixed with all other pigments and was a fast drier in oil. The poor tinting strength and high cost of cobalt green kept it in limited use. Field called it, "chemically good and artistically bad"
history of cobalt green [webexhibits.org]
Re:Room temperature != operational temperature. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Room temperature != operational temperature. (Score:3, Informative)
C stands for complemtary - originally used to describe a PNP and NPN on the output of an amplifier (the output sections of logic devices are indeed amplifiers).
The problem is that, as the inputs are transitioning between high and low voltages, BOTH transistor networks are (partially) conductive. This allows current to flow directly from the high-voltage rail to the low-voltage rail, with minimal resistance.
Normally called contention or shoot-through.