Recently there have been significant breakthroughs in ways to reduce the amount of energy needed for electronic calculation and therefore a reduction in the heat produced by the electronics.  This becomes more and more important as processes shrink and transistors become ever more dense.  Most notable is Intel’s announcement of their success in developing 3D transistors, called Tri-Gate technology, which will require vastly reduced amounts of power to change state as well as reducing leakage.  Nanotechweb has put up an article dealing with another technique to deal with the heat which has also been in the news recently, magnetic memory.  The benefit to magnetic memory is to allow the usage of the north and south poles as 1 and 0, instead of using electrons to change charges which creates heat thanks to resistance in the circuit.  Current experiments utilize nanomagnets 100 nm wide and 200 nm long, fairly large when compared to current electronics, but show great promise and this field is one that should be watched.

"Tiny magnetic memory and logic devices that consume very little energy have been developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. With further improvements, the devices could operate close to the "Landauer limit" of minimum energy consumption because they require no moving electrons to work – something that could revolutionize electronics."

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