Spin Is In

From Forbes.com: Technology News:

Six physicists are building a magnetic PC that does more and wastes less. The computer of the future, one that sips power, boots up instantly and ably handles the most complex speech and image recognition, is under construction in a handful of laboratories. If this research bears fruit, we will have spintronic computing. Spintronics is an emerging field of chip design in which circuits open and close according to the spin of electrons rather than their location. Today's microprocessors and memory chips depend on keeping electrons in tiny boxes--microscopic Leyden jars. If electrons are in the box you have a one; if not, you have a zero. Transistors can move electrons around and detect them so data can be manipulated. This process slurps energy. Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people )'s most powerful chip, with 2 billion circuits, draws 130 watts even when idle. But a spintronic chip would operate at half the power draw because it doesn't have to move the electrons; it just turns them in place using electromagnetic force. Electrons are subatomic spinning tops: Spin up and spin down are the electron's version of clockwise and counterclockwise. Keeping the electrons in one orientation or the other and observing their orientation would be a way to store and read information. One result: cool-running laptops with twice the battery life of current models. Corporate and government data centers, which consume 2% of the U.S.' electricity, could cut their air-conditioning bills.

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