Magnetic whirls pave the way for energy-efficient computing

Phys.org  September 11, 2023 Magnetic skyrmions have garnered considerable interest due to a variety of electromagnetic responses that are governed by the topology. The topology that creates a microscopic gyro tropic force also causes detrimental effects, such as the skyrmion Hall effect, which is a well-studied phenomenon highlighting the influence of topology on the deterministic dynamics and drift motion. Furthermore, the gyrotropic force is anticipated to have a substantial impact on stochastic diffusive motion; however, the predicted repercussions have yet to be demonstrated, even qualitatively. An international team of researchers (Germany, Japan, Sweden, Czech Republic) demonstrated enhanced thermally activated diffusive […]

Magnonic computing: Faster spin waves could make novel computing systems possible

Phys.org  August 16, 2023 Spin waves are ideal candidates for wave-based computing, but the construction of magnetic circuits is blocked by the lack of an efficient mechanism to excite long-running exchange spin waves with normalized amplitudes. An international team of researchers (Austria, Ukraine, Germany, Czech Republic) solved the problem by exploiting a deeply nonlinear phenomenon for forward volume spin waves in 200-nm-wide nanoscale waveguides and validated their concept using microfocused Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy. An unprecedented nonlinear frequency shift of more than 2 GHz was achieved, corresponding to a magnetization precession angle of 55° and enabled the excitation of spin […]

Using magnetic effects in electrons for a hundredfold reduction in the power consumption of future chips

Nanowerk August 15, 2023 As electronic devices shrink, they become more powerful, use more energy and produce more heat. A consortium of researchers is working under an EU funded HORIZON project, “SPIDER” (Spin Wave Computing for Ultimately-Scaled Hybrid Low-Power Electronics), to investigate how changes to the magnetic properties of semiconductors could achieve a hundredfold reduction in the power consumption of computer chips. They have developed a computer system that combines magnonics with conventional computing technology with its standard semiconductor systems. They produced an interface between the conventional computer and a spin wave circuit made from sapphire or gadolinium gallium garnet […]

A quantum leap in computational performance of quantum processors

Phys.org  April 24, 2023 An international team of researchers (Israel, Germany, UAE) is improving the performance of superconducting qubits, the basic computation units of a superconducting quantum processor. They studied a series of tunable flux qubits inductively coupled to a coplanar waveguide resonator fabricated on a sapphire substrate. Each qubit included an asymmetric superconducting quantum interference device, which is controlled by the application of an external magnetic field and acts as a tunable Josephson junction. The tunability of the qubits is typically ±3.5GHz around their central gap frequency. The measured relaxation times are limited by dielectric losses in the substrate […]

The Key to Securing Legacy Computing Systems

DARPA News  April 10, 2023 For a cyber-attack to be successful, one must conduct a sequence of exploits to move from the initial system access, through privilege escalation and lateral motion steps, until reaching the ultimate target. With processor hardware enhancements, fine-grained software compartmentalization would not significantly impact the system’s speed and efficiency. The challenge, however, is in the billions of lines of existing software, all of which would be impossibly time-consuming to rewrite in safer programming languages. Through its new Compartmentalization and Privilege Management (CPM) program, DARPA is seeking proposals to develop tools that can automatically restructure a software […]

Listen up, material!

Nanowerk  March 27, 2023 Physical reservoir computing is a computational paradigm that enables spatiotemporal pattern recognition to be performed directly in matter. The use of physical matter leads the way toward energy-efficient devices capable of solving machine learning problems without having to build a system of millions of interconnected neurons. An international team of researchers (Germany, Belgium) proposed a high-performance “skyrmion mixture reservoir” that implemented the reservoir computing model with multidimensional inputs. This implementation solved spoken digit classification tasks with an overall model accuracy of 97.4% and a < 1% word error rate. According to the researchers due to the quality of […]

Mathematics at the speed of light

Nanowerk  January 16, 2023 Ultrathin optical metasurfaces have been recently explored to process large images in real time, in particular for edge detection. They can be tailored to solve complex mathematical problems in the analogue domain, although these efforts have so far been limited to guided-wave systems and bulky set-ups. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, USA – University of Pennsylvania, City University of New York) developed an ultrathin Si metasurface-based platform for analogue computing that was able to solve Fredholm integral equations of the second kind using free-space visible radiation. A Si-based metagrating was inverse-designed to implement the […]

Tapping hidden visual information: An all-in-one detector for thousands of colors

Science Daily  October 20, 2022 Miniaturized computational spectrometers, which can obtain incident spectra using a combination of spectral responses and reconstruction algorithms, are essential for on-chip and implantable applications. Highly sensitive spectral measurement using a single detector allows the footprints of such spectrometers to be scaled down while achieving spectral resolution approaching that of benchtop systems. An international team of researchers (Finland, USA – Oregon State University, South Korea, UK, China) has developed a high-performance computational spectrometer based on a single van der Waals junction with an electrically tunable transport-mediated spectral response. They achieved high peak wavelength accuracy, high spectral […]

Team develops method for neural net computing in water

Phys.org  September 29, 2022 Ions in water move slower than electrons in semiconductors, scientists think the diversity of ionic species with different physical and chemical properties could be harnessed for richer and more diverse information processing. A team of researchers at Harvard University developed a 16 × 16 array of new ionic transistors in an aqueous quinone solution. Each transistor features a concentric ring electrode pair with a disk electrode at the center. The electrodes in the solution provided the basis for the transistor operation. The ring pair electrochemically tunes the local electrolytic concentration to modulate the disk’s Faradaic reaction […]

From bits to p-bits: One step closer to probabilistic computing

Nanowerk  August 29, 2022 To engineer probabilistic computers for more advanced computers researchers in Japan have developed a mathematical description to understand what happens to p-bits which could form the basis of probablistic computing. They utilized superparamagnetic tunnel junctions that have high sensitivity to external perturbations and determined the exponents through several independent measurements. They experimentally clarified the ‘switching exponent’ that governs fluctuation under the perturbations caused by magnetic field and spin-transfer torque in magnetic tunnel junctions. This gave them the mathematical foundation to implement magnetic tunnel junctions into the p-bit to sophisticatedly design probabilistic computers. They showed that these […]