New transistor could cut 5% from world’s digital energy budget
A new spin on one of the 20th century’s smallest but grandest inventions, the transistor, could help feed the world’s ever-growing appetite for digital memory while slicing up to 5% of the energy from its power-hungry diet.
Following years of innovations from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Christian Binek and University at Buffalo’s Jonathan Bird and Keke He, the physicists recently teamed up to craft the first magneto-electric transistor.
Along with curbing the energy consumption of any microelectronics that incorporate it, the team’s design could reduce the number of transistors needed to store certain data by as much as 75%, said Nebraska physicist Peter Dowben, leading to smaller devices. It could also lend those microelectronics steel-trap memory that remembers exactly where its users leave off, even after being shut down or abruptly losing power.
“The implications of this most recent demonstration are profound,” said Dowben, who co-authored a recent paper on the work that graced the cover of the journal Advanced Materials.
Many millions of transistors line the surface of every modern integrated circuit, or microchip, which itself is manufactured in staggering numbers — roughly 1 trillion in 2020 alone — from the industry-favorite semiconducting material, silicon. By regulating the flow of electric current within a microchip, the tiny transistor effectively acts as a nanoscopic on-off switch that’s essential to writing, reading and storing data as the 1s and 0s of digital technology.
But silicon-based microchips are nearing their practical limits, Dowben said. Those limits have the semiconductor industry investigating and funding every promising alternative it can. More