Spintronics

Another fundamental computing advance

So we’ve talked about Extropic’s thermodynamic computing and Turing Quantum/CHIPX’s quantum photonic computing.

I don’t have a vendor success story for spintronics computing, the use of an electron’s spin in addition to its charge. This technology direction is not new, but it’s been slow to mature on that axis. Basically it will not offer a new computing paradigm, as we see with the other two technologies, but spintronics will enable cheaper, cooler ways of doing Von Neuman machines.

Spintronics has long been in every spindle hard drive out there, and it’s common in RFID tags as magnetoresistive memory, so it’s not new in that regard. But for the moment you can only get storage based on this technology, not computing power.

The tiny size and thermal tolerance these devices have as storage make it likely that we’ll see thermodynamic/spintronic devices that are medically embeddable. If one chip in each eye captures light, and a tiny embed turns photons into electrical impulses for your optic nerve …

That’s not science fiction by the way, it’s a company connected to MIT, and their opto-neuronic interface at this time is a two pound brick. When it’s a two ounce necklace that’s better, and when it’s a pair of two gram companion chips inside you, goodbye age related macular degeneration.