Japanese researchers have emerged from their smoke-filled labs claiming to have built a switching gadget that could make processors faster without turning data centres into expensive fan heaters.
High-performance computing keeps running into the same two brick walls: power bills and waste heat. The faster a processor runs, the more heat it usually pumps out.
The boffins from the Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, have come up with a new device, called a “non-volatile switching element,” can handle rapid processing without the usual heat mess tied to faster chips. The device can process a bit in just 40 picoseconds or 40 trillionths of a second. Conventional chips struggle to process a bit in less than a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second, which suddenly looks rather sluggish.
In a study published on 14 May in Science, the researchers showed ultralow-power switching in the picosecond range was possible. The team built the non-volatile switching element from ultrathin layers of tantalum and Mn3Sn on a silica base.
Tantalum was picked because it is a refractory metal that can store and release electricity. Mn3Sn was used because it is antiferromagnetic, with stable magnetic properties and resistance to outside magnetic interference.
The researchers then used an ultrafast pulse generator to control bursts of light as quick as 60 picoseconds per pulse. Each pulse sat within the normal communication wavelength band. The light passed through a high-speed photodetector called a uni-travelling-carrier photodiode, or UTD-PD.
When the switching element received pulses from the UTD-PD, electron spins in the material changed. The researchers then recorded a tiny magnetic force.
In lab trials, the device worked consistently and reliably through more than a billion switches, showing it had decent stability rather than just lab-bench swagger.
The process did not need a constant flow of electricity to keep the magnetic information in place. That matters because it produced far less extra heat than a conventional computing processor. The trick is to switch fast without dragging in the thermal baggage that usually comes with speed.
Waste heat remains a major barrier to scaling data centre processing power, the scientists said in the study. With lower power needs and less thermal output, the non-volatile switching element could reduce processor power demands and ease cooling costs.
There is, naturally, a catch. Tantalum is rare and already in demand, so turning this into a mass-market miracle widget could get tricky. The device still needs testing outside the tidy comfort of the lab. The scientists said a prototype chip could be ready by 2030.
They reckon making the Mn3Sn layer thinner could cut power consumption further. The next job is finding a commercially viable bulk manufacturing process that can build the thing at scale.
