18th Century Pigment to Revolutionize Chip Design?

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.

[business_kid]

I read that differently. The processor would stay much the same, but the net effect of the spintronics stuff would be to reduce (I thought) dissapation in existing circuits. Power calculations have the frequency component in them, so switching losses could theoretically be reduced greatly. If it allowed miniturisation, and it seems to offer promise there, the capacitive element of power consumption would also be reduced. All we need is a major cpu manufacturer to take a gamble on it and plug a few billion into research, hiring me :-)).

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[headkase]

I'm still waiting for my diamond processor [opentechsupport.net] that runs at a nice 300 Ghz. And it would probably be an eight core cpu by the time it graduates from lab to mass produced consumer item.

Re:Room temperature != operational temperature.

[packeteer]

It is possible to process information with absolutly 0 energy expended. If you use a certain transistor to do a calculation and then do the same calculation in reverse it requires 0 energy and produces 0 heat. It is a perfectly efficient process. This is called reversible logic.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/176/ibmrd17 06G.pdf [ibm.com]

This idea is over 40 years old and is well understood science. This is not science fiction and many of the technical aspects of how to engineer a system like this have been worked out but obviously not all just yet.

Re:American Era artists?

[Red Flayer]

Not only that, but it wasn't used as an art pigment until significantly later... so no, American painters during the Revolutionary era were NOT using it [handprint.com].

The first modern cobalt paints date from cobalt green (PG19), discovered around 1780 by the Swedishchemist Sven Rinmann, but not used as an artists' color until around 1835.