Regrettable that academia didnt learn from industry how to deploy, only how to spin. When everything is framed as an "investment", researchers aren't incentivized to discover but to squeeze out "returns" even when there arent much
Perhaps, more precisely, it's a shame that governments turned research funding into a private sector game like start-up funding.
It seems no mystery why western governments are saying insane things like they need to be competitive in the quantum computing space: their frontal-lobes (the research industry) has been hijacked by the hype machines formerly constrained to the private sector.
This is so bad it's not even clear what they are spinning. Is this a memory device? A compute element? What?
Physicists have been fooling around with yttrium iron garnet for decades.[1][2] It apparently has really weird interactions between photons and magnetic fields. That's promising, because semiconductors came from studying weird interactions between electric charge and current flow in unusual solid materials. Yttrium iron garnet been tried experimentally for microwave phase-shifters and beam-forming antennas, but doesn't seem to have appeared in products yet.
So, decades of papers, but no products yet. There's real physics there, but the hype is overblown. Probably because someone needs funding and grad students to work in this obscure area.
> Regrettable that academia didnt learn from industry how to deploy, only how to spin.
Hey, this was from phys.org and spin matters a lot to certain physicists!
More seriously: with funding being less prevalent and the cultural shift to the dominance of commerce-worshipping Gradgrinds, university press offices and even individual professors are under a lot of pressure to point out the practicality (which today means “marketability”) of everything, even an abstract mathematical proof!
I can’t count how many academic presentations I’ve heard that ended with 15-20 minutes with the author trying to justify the work. They are professors, not business people, and they almost always sound like they are struggling to jump through that hoop. The time would have better been spent talking further about the actual subject matter!
Memristors are inherently not practical, and there were plenty of people pointing this at the time.
Magnetronics are an open question, nobody really knows how useful it can be. (But they have more promise for energy efficiency than miniaturization and cost-cutting.)
HP still knocks the dust off that one every few years, touts their major achievements towards it each time, and implies it's only a couple of years until it'll hit the market.
It has been a few years, which means we're probably close to the next round of articles.
I heard a rumour that they sold of the IP rights piecemeal to so many different entities that it's nearly impossible to actually legally use the technology in a product anymore.
Did I understand this right: they can do 0 to 1, but haven’t figured out 1 to 0 yet?
That’s a big “could”.
I don’t like the tag links the site inserts in to the text. If you follow one, you generate a nice extra hit on the site, but I struggle to see the value.
it’s an ad for their lab and research. that was clear to me before I clicked the link. I didn’t know anything about magnetic approaches to this tho so I appreciate the overview tbh
So if I am understanding correctly this YIG-nanomagnet device expands on the work of spin-wave computation in a hybrid CMOS setting and allows for read and write which would allow in memory computation? How does a YIG-nanomagnet work? Does it hold its state after a charge is applied or does it need a constant amplitude to keep it in either a 0 or 1 state? I find this very interesting and would love to read more about the work.
>"Nanomagnet reversal happened only when the spin wave hit a certain amplitude, and could then be used to write and read data."
Reminds me of Mr. Spock (being tested by an automated AI test administrator) in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home", when the AI asks the following question:
"Adjust the sine wave of this magnetic envelope so that anti-neutrons can pass through it but anti-gravitons can not..."
To be clear, there is some dissipation with magnons, just a lot less than Joule heating. But exciting a magnon will heat up your sample, because magnons don't live forever and decay after some time. That energy has to go somewhere.
How do you deal with all the output "garbage" signals that reversible computing produces? Do they all get sent somewhere, and the place where they get sent to discards them but heats up?
Readit News
It seems no mystery why western governments are saying insane things like they need to be competitive in the quantum computing space: their frontal-lobes (the research industry) has been hijacked by the hype machines formerly constrained to the private sector.
Physicists have been fooling around with yttrium iron garnet for decades.[1][2] It apparently has really weird interactions between photons and magnetic fields. That's promising, because semiconductors came from studying weird interactions between electric charge and current flow in unusual solid materials. Yttrium iron garnet been tried experimentally for microwave phase-shifters and beam-forming antennas, but doesn't seem to have appeared in products yet.
So, decades of papers, but no products yet. There's real physics there, but the hype is overblown. Probably because someone needs funding and grad students to work in this obscure area.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-astronomy/y...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41535-017-0067-y.pdf
Hey, this was from phys.org and spin matters a lot to certain physicists!
More seriously: with funding being less prevalent and the cultural shift to the dominance of commerce-worshipping Gradgrinds, university press offices and even individual professors are under a lot of pressure to point out the practicality (which today means “marketability”) of everything, even an abstract mathematical proof!
I can’t count how many academic presentations I’ve heard that ended with 15-20 minutes with the author trying to justify the work. They are professors, not business people, and they almost always sound like they are struggling to jump through that hoop. The time would have better been spent talking further about the actual subject matter!
Magnetronics are an open question, nobody really knows how useful it can be. (But they have more promise for energy efficiency than miniaturization and cost-cutting.)
There were practical products based on it, shipped in volume!
What do you mean they were "inherently" not practical?
It has been a few years, which means we're probably close to the next round of articles.
Did I understand this right: they can do 0 to 1, but haven’t figured out 1 to 0 yet?
That’s a big “could”.
I don’t like the tag links the site inserts in to the text. If you follow one, you generate a nice extra hit on the site, but I struggle to see the value.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4919584
Reminds me of Mr. Spock (being tested by an automated AI test administrator) in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home", when the AI asks the following question:
"Adjust the sine wave of this magnetic envelope so that anti-neutrons can pass through it but anti-gravitons can not..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ooUXjNPS8&t=51s
(A classic line, still to this day! <g>)