Using magnetostrictive materials for powering more efficient computing devices in the future

Computing, a crucial part of this digital world, it entirely relies on the computational power of servers and networks, and by now our computing devices are reaching the point where making more modifications to designs, architecture, technologies are just able to make the devices a little bit efficient, but not a whole lot. And also the fact our devices, their components are also not power-efficient, so what about using magnetic fields instead of electricity for our devices, sounds crazy but listen up. 

A team led by the University of Michigan researchers, John Heron, a U-M materials science and engineering professor, and also researchers from Intel, Cornell University, University of California, Berkely, and more, have developed a material that is twice as magnetostrictive, which is a property of a magnetic material to change shape under a when magnetized, its the same thing which causes the buzz of fluorescent lights and electrical transformers, and this material is far less costly than other materials. 

This material can be the key to a better and more efficient generation of devices and magnetoelectrics. Magnetoelectric chips can make everything from massive data centers to cell phones far more energy-efficient, which is a very big deal. 

The material is an alloy of Iron and Gallium, it is used due to its large spin-orbit coupling and unique electronic structure, and the magnetostriction increases as more gallium is added, but that can only be done to an extent as adding more and more gallium makes it form ordered atomic structures, so in order to counter that researchers used low-temperature molecular beam epitaxy to freeze atoms in place, by which they were able to double the amount o gallium in the material, increasing magnetostriction. The magnetoelectric devices use magnetic fields to store binary, ones, and zeros, whereas our traditional devices use electricity. Tiny pulses of electricity cause them to expand or contract slightly, flipping their magnetic field from positive to negative or vice versa. Because they don’t require a steady stream of electricity, as today’s chips do, they use a fraction of the energy of what traditional devices would use.

Most of today's magnetostrictive materials use rare earth elements, which are as said, rare and scarce, which makes them costly to be used in the quantities needed for computing devices, but this new material is made from iron and gallium, which makes this very inexpensive.

The magnetostrictive devices made in the study are several microns in size, but researchers are working with intel to find ways to shrink them to a more useful size, as micron is still huge, like a large size standard when it comes to computing, as a micron is 1000 nanometers.

This technology still might be decades in development but it may bring a big change too.

Source - University of Michigan

Paper - DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22793-x