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to do in a university environment. So there are these kinds of practical issues.
But if you can demonstrate things, then I think you can draw larger support so
it would be very important to do.
On the other hand, there also are scientific issues related to these magnets,
to making these magnets switch with less effort. The nice thing about magnets is
they're very stable, but it's just hard to switch them. The two things obviously
go hand in hand. We heard about some work at this workshop about different
ways of switching magnets. Generating magnetic fields is costly, so having voltage
control over magnetism would be a very important breakthrough. We heard some
work from the Torino group on using strain to accomplish that, and I think it's
very important work. We heard some work from Berkeley about using the spin
Hall effect to do that, and I think that this is important work as well.
Getting somewhere has payoffs along the way that Bob mentioned before. If
we, as a community here, were to come up with radical and different ways of
voltage control, the first applications would not be in magnetic QCA. The first
applications would be in MRAM, there's no question about it.
Wa lus
(Konrad): I think in this community, there are two groups: people that
really care about making individual devices and people who are thinking about
circuits. There are issues that are being raised at the circuit level and issues
that are being raised at the device level, and the circuit guys say, “Yeah, yeah,
yeah, you guys will solve it” and the device guys will say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you guys will sort that out,” right?
I think that one thing we really need to do is to find the killer app for QCA.
We're talking about CPUs, and we're talking about adders, and the writing's
kind of on the wall about deep pipelining, and we're talking about sensors. But
we need to really define the killer app for this technology. Is it image processing,
or something else? Then I think the sort of path will be more clear. Right now,
we're sort of exploring everything and nothing is really definite.
Wo lkow:
Well, I won't go into great detail, but one of the lucky things that's
happened to us is that we've managed to get people at TI and Lockheed to
engage in a conversation with us. I'm impressed by what they've said so far.
They've been able to think of things that would meet their needs, things I never
would have thought of, some of which relate to things like A/D conversion. These
would be things that I think we could make. With the capability to stamp out
thousands of cells, which, given our current capabilities, would only take minutes,
we might be able to make some circuits that would be useful in very rarified
situations like satellite applications. Places where it wouldn't matter if the chip
cost ten thousand dollars because that cost is insignificant compared to the cost
of just getting the thing up there and making sure it works.
I always give this example of the CCD. When people were trying to perfect
the charge coupled device - an optical detector - they were lucky to have those
few customers who were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for one
detector, and that allowed them to make a little money (not really profit, but at
least to keep going). That led to reductions of cost and eventually widespread
deployment. So, I'm trying to find those
first
customers, and I think maybe with
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