Spin Buses Proposed to Provide Low Power Massively Parallel Chip Interconnections

Sat Aug 26 15:55:58 -0700 2006
manage

Researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have announced three designs for interconnecting chip components using a "spin wave bus" that acts as a waveguide for electron spin rather than the current flow other spintronic devices employ, and their devices will work at room temperature.

They claim their designs can allow simultaneous communication of many signals over the same paths, and that a single node in an electronic chip can be allowed to directly communicate to a huge number of other nodes, rather than the very limited fanout of normal current-based gate elements.  They envision massive meshes of processors for parallel computing where each processor can signal all the others at once, all on one chip.  And power consumption is extemely low since electron current is not the means of transmission.