by Max Maxfield
I’m a digital logic designer by trade. In an ever-changing and increasingly unreliable world, I find the certainty of Boolean equations to be extremely reassuring. You know where you are with a Karnaugh map, you can trust a De Morgan transformation, and you can gratify your desire for single-bit transitions with a Gray code. By comparison, I find the wibbly-wobbly nature of analog electronics to be somewhat disconcerting, which is unfortunate because there’s so much of it about these days.
One of the funny things is that “analog” was supposed to be the stuff of yesteryear. When I was coming up in electronics, digital functions were expensive in terms of transistors, and transistors were expensive in terms of cold, hard cash. That’s one of the reasons why analog computers hung on for decades after their digital counterparts first arrived on the scene. It was possible to implement analog signal processing (ASP) functions using a handful o
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“Independent of each other, graphene and spintronics each possess incredible potential to fundamentally change many aspects of business and society. But if you can blend the two together, the synergistic effects are likely to be something this world hasn’t yet seen, ”
Nargess Arabchigavkani, postdoctoral research associate
SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Graphene is incredibly strong, lightweight, conductive … the list of its superlative properties goes on.
It is not, however, magnetic a shortcoming that has stunted its usefulness in spintronics, an emerging field that scientists say could eventually rewrite the rules of electronics, leading to more powerful semiconductors, computers and other devices.
Graphene with Artificial Magnetic Texture Could Enable More Robust Electronic Devices
Graphene is unbelievably strong, conductive, lightweight and the list of its superior properties continues.
The image shows eight electrodes around a 20 nm-thick magnet (white rectangle) and graphene (white dotted line). Image Credit: University at Buffalo.
However, graphene lacks one main property it is not magnetic, and this drawback has dwarfed its applications in spintronics, a rising field which, according to researchers, could ultimately rewrite the rules of electronics, resulting in more robust computers, semiconductors and other devices.
Led by the University at Buffalo (UB), an international group of researchers has now reported progress that could help surpass this barrier.
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IMAGE: The image shows eight electrodes around a 20-nanometer-thick magnet (white rectangle). The graphene, not show, is less than is less than 1 nanometer thick and next to the magnet.. view more
Credit: University at Buffalo.
BUFFALO, N.Y. Graphene is incredibly strong, lightweight, conductive . the list of its superlative properties goes on.
It is not, however, magnetic a shortcoming that has stunted its usefulness in spintronics, an emerging field that scientists say could eventually rewrite the rules of electronics, leading to more powerful semiconductors, computers and other devices.
Now, an international research team led by the University at Buffalo is reporting an advancement that could help overcome this obstacle.