News Spinning Out Faster, Better Chips

You spin me round-round baby, right round, like a record baby....

This from Wired:

SAN JOSE, California -- IBM and Stanford University said on Monday they have established a laboratory to develop new, faster computer chips based on spintronics, an esoteric field that taps the electromagnetic properties of electrons to yield more computing power.

Known as the Spintronic Science and Applications Center, or SpinAps, the laboratory will have facilities at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose and at the Stanford campus in nearby Palo Alto. Researchers will primarily study ways in which the spin, or orientation, of electrons can be used to overcome impending obstacles in contemporary computer chip design.

"We're trying to do what we think could be as significant as the beginning of electronics and the discovery of the transistor decades ago," said Robert Morris, director of the Almaden Research Center. "This lays the groundwork for the future in many ways."

The general concept behind spintronics has been used in hard drives since 1997. But scientists at IBM and Stanford hope their research will help them adapt the technology to other areas of computer design

Full story here

So here we have yet another way to smash Moore's law. Not so much a law these days as a general guideline, eh?