Graphene magnetologic gates could replace silicon transistor logic

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside have received a $1.85 million research grant to work on “magnetologic gates,” a brand new computing building block made from graphene and magnetic electrodes that would replace transistors in today’s computer chips.

Current silicon gates are pure logic — on or off, billions of times per second. In magnetologic gates, there are two magnetic electrodes that magnetically store data — like a hard drive — connected by a sheet of graphene. As electrons travel across the graphene their spin state is compared against the magnetic data in the electrodes, and a binary value is calculated. In this way, both data can be stored and logic can be performed in the same building block. A magnetologic chip might be made of billions of these individual blocks, just like today’s silicon CPUs.

If you haven’t heard about electron spin before and how it can be used in logic circuits, read our explainer on spintronics and straintronics. Basically, depending on an electron’s spin, it can behave as a tiny north or south pole that can be measured by a computer chip; the spin becomes its binary value, in other words. As an added bonus, changing the spin on an electron requires much less power than switching a transistor, too.

With magnetologic, every gate in the circuit would effectively be its own little computer with its own, tiny, two-bit array of cache, and as such, chips made out of these new gates will be capable of chewing through data-intensive applications like never before. Silicon chips are increasingly parallel, but the overhead of constantly hitting an off-gate, off-die, or hard disk cache is huge. Magnetologic chips will feast on tasks like data compression, image recognition, searching, and any task that involves large data sets, like artificial intelligence, and could pave the way for a continuation of Moore’s law after the physical limitations of silicon electronics are reached in the next few years.

Sadly the press release is woefully ha y on when we might see the first magnetologic chip, or what its performance characteristics might be, but we’ll update you when we find out more.

Graphene magnetologic gates could replace silicon transistor logic