Spintronic 3D Microchip Developed

A new type of microchip based on spintronic technology was created that not only moves information from left to right and back to front, but up and down as well.

In electronics, semiconductors utilize the electrical charge carried by the electron. It carries either a positive charge or negative charge. Information is based on the charge of these electrons.

Aside from the electrical charge, electrons also has another property; its spin. The spin of an electron makes it behave like a bar magnet. It either points up or down. Spintronic technology takes advantage of this property to add one more component in storing information in an electron. Aside from the charge which could either be positive or negative, it can also carry information based on the spin which is either up or down.

Spintronic devices act according to the following scheme:

1. Information is stored (written) into spins as a particular spin orientation (up or down).
2. The spin, being attached to mobile electrons, carry the information along a wire.
3. The information is read at a terminal.

The spin orientation lasts longer than electron momentum (nanoseconds -10x^-9 compared to femtoseconds -10x^-15). This makes it optimal for applications such as memory storage and magnetic sensors applications.

Because of the efficiency in storing and transmitting information, spintronic based devices are smaller, cheaper, stable and more accurate than existing conventional devices. At the moment, some hard drives use this technology in data storage.

Storing Digital Information in DNA May Be Commercially Viable In The Near Future

Image: extremetech.com

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have developed a process that would make storing digital information in DNA commercially viable.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are biological molecules containing genetic information used in the development and function of all known living organisms.

DNA stores information based on the arrangement of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The sequence of the bases determines how a particular cell or organism is maintained.

The way DNA stores information is similar to that of a computer. Instead of 0s and 1s in computer bits, DNA uses the A,G,C, and T bases. The four bases pair up to form a DNA base pair which is attached to a sugar and a phosphate molecule. The resulting structure from multiple base pairs attached to the sugar/phosphate molecule is the DNA double helix.

Last 2012, Harvard researchers used the four DNA nucleobases as binary markers. They substituted A and C for the digit 0 and the T and G for the digit 1. Whereas in computers, information would come out in 1s and 0s like 00101110011100, DNA encoded information would come out like this: TGAACCTCAAGTAACCTT.

Using this technique, they managed to store 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA. Researchers at EMBL-EBI have managed to develop a process to encode information into DNA using next-generation DNA synthesis and sequencing technologies.