The big picture: Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a magnetic switching device that can operate at speeds up to 1,000 times faster than the fastest AI accelerators on the market today, but uses only a fraction of the energy and generating minimal heat. The new invention could potentially solve the problem of overheating and battery drain in electronics, paving the way for super-efficient computers and smartphones.
The research, which was published in Science earlier this week, builds on another study published in Nature in January 2025. It demonstrates a new way to flip a binary magnetic state at picosecond speeds - a massive improvement over the nanosecond-scale switching considered standard for modern silicon-based processors.
The research could lead to a new technology capable of handling the fundamental problem with conventional processors: heat. The speed of a processor is directly proportional to the amount of heat it generates, meaning the faster they run, the more heat they generate. This leads to excessive power consumption, which puts a massive strain on the infrastructure around data centers.
The study's authors believe they have finally solved this problem by building a new spintronic device using a manganese and tin compound (Mn3Sn) known as an antiferromagnet. Spintronic devices utilize both the charge and the spin of electrons in specialized materials to process, store, and transmit data, rather than relying solely on charge, as in traditional semiconductors.
As a proof of concept, the researchers demonstrated that sending a 40-picosecond electrical pulse through the antiferromagnet to flip its magnetic state from one binary position to another generates minimal resistive heat compared to traditional computing switches. It also uses a fraction of the energy used by modern AI accelerators, raising hopes for faster and more efficient AI hardware in the future.
In case you're wondering, one picosecond is an incredibly brief unit of time equal to one trillionth of a second. It is 1,000 times shorter than a nanosecond and is primarily used by physicists to measure the lifetimes of subatomic particles and the time it takes to break certain chemical bonds.
If the technology can reliably and economically transition from research labs to commercial factories, it could find applications in cloud-based quantum services, making optical quantum computing accessible to general users. According to Professor Tomo Nakatsuji of the University of Tokyo, "there is (also) a possibility that data that takes an hour to download can be processed in one second."
However, it is worth noting that although the switching of the binary state is the fundamental operation of computing, increasing its speed by 1,000x won't raise the total computing speed one thousand times. This is because a computer is not just a switch. It relies on myriad hardware and software components working in unison to read, process, and transmit data, so a faster switch can only do so much.