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John O | June 2017

UT-Dallas engineer designs all-carbon, spintronic computing system


dr. joseph friedman, a researcher at the university of texas at dallas, has designed a novel computing system that uses carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons to build spintronic transistors that are smaller than standard silicon transistors and could someday be used in high-powered electronics, according to a report on the ut-dallas website.

 



dr. joseph friedman built an all-carbon computing system. (ut-dallas)

 

friedman began his research as a doctoral student at northwestern university and pulls together several strands of nanoscale research and combines them in a novel way to create a system that is smaller than silicon but with increased performance.

 

the article explained, “friedman’s all-carbon, spintronic switch functions as a logic gate that relies on a basic tenet of electromagnetics: as an electric current moves through a wire, it creates a magnetic field that wraps around the wire. in addition, a magnetic field near a two-dimensional ribbon of carbon — called a graphene nanoribbon — affects the current flowing through the ribbon.”

 

it continued, “in traditional, silicon-based computers, transistors cannot exploit this phenomenon. instead, they are connected to one another by wires. the output from one transistor is connected by a wire to the input for the next transistor, and so on in a cascading fashion.”

 

in freidman’s design, electrons move through carbon nanotubes to create a magnetic field that affects the current flowing through nearby graphene nanoribbons. this creates disconnected logic gates.

 

the article added, “because the communication between each of the graphene nanoribbons takes place via an electromagnetic wave, instead of the physical movement of electrons, friedman expects that communication will be much faster, with the potential for terahertz clock speeds. in addition, these carbon materials can be made smaller than silicon-based transistors, which are nearing their size limit due to silicon’s limited material properties.”

 

this project is still conceptual but friedman is working on a prototype in the lab.

 

this research was recently published in nature communications. the abstract stated:

 

“remarkable breakthroughs have established the functionality of graphene and carbon nanotube transistors as replacements to silicon in conventional computing structures, and numerous spintronic logic gates have been presented.

 

“however, an efficient cascaded logic structure that exploits electron spin has not yet been demonstrated. in this work, we introduce and analyse a cascaded spintronic computing system composed solely of low-dimensional carbon materials.

 

“we propose a spintronic switch based on the recent discovery of negative magnetoresistance in graphene nanoribbons, and demonstrate its feasibility through tight-binding calculations of the band structure. covalently connected carbon nanotubes create magnetic fields through graphene nanoribbons, cascading logic gates through incoherent spintronic switching.

 

“the exceptional material properties of carbon materials permit terahertz operation and two orders of magnitude decrease in power-delay product compared to cutting-edge microprocessors.

 

“we hope to inspire the fabrication of these cascaded logic circuits to stimulate a transformative generation of energy-efficient computing.”

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