Mobile Phone News:

We’ve seen phones that are waterproofed using magical plasma-based technologies. We’ve seen phones that can automatically sense the environment round them. We’ve even seen phones that can charge themselves wirelessly out of thin air (or we will do soon, according to Nokia). But today, it’s the turn of something that’s straight out the pages of a big sci-fi novel to strut its stuff.

It’s called ’spintronics’, according to IntoMobile, and it’s guaranteed to be one of those scientific breakthroughs that makes you go “er, what?” until you realise how utterly, frighteningly revolutionary it could be. I’ve gone on about things being unique in the world of mobile phones, like the HD video in the Samsung i8910 HD, chucking out phrases like “the mobile world’s never seen anything like this, before”. Rest assured, every technological advance ever could potentially pale in comparison next to spintronics. That’s how important this story could be…

Yes, I’m talking about every area of technological life potentially being affected, and made much, much more science-fiction-y. ‘Cos it’s got quantum in it.

This is the bit where I try and explain it to you in layman’s terms, which should be fun, since I’ve only just grasped the enormity of it myself. But consider the word ‘electronic’. Electronic devices work, simply, due to the flow of electrons, through a wire, or a circuit, or the complicated bits inside a computer’s (or indeed, a mobile phone’s) processor.

Spintronics relies on something else, called ‘topological insulators’. Basically, they’re tiny 3D structures that let electrons flow freely over their surface. They were thought to be entirely theoretical, until recently, when a team of physicists, led by Yulin Chen and Zhi-Xun Shen, discovered a compound, bismuth telluride, that lets electrons flow across its surface without losing any energy, which is the crucial bit, because entropy, loss of energy, would be a killer.

Now we get to the quantum bit…

Aligning the spin of an electron, called the quantum spin Hall effect, with its motion across the topological insulator’s surface is the bit that makes it not lose any energy. It’s that quantum spin that’s crucial to the whole thing, and that’s why it’s called spintronics. And here’s the clever part: you can use the spin of an electron so that it doesn’t just act as a standard electron in the electronics sense, but so that it also carries information. Kinda like a sub-atomic messenger service.

By now, you’re probably as lost as I was when I first read it, but what it amounts to, in terms of computing, is this: chipsets and devices using spintronic technology will be immensely faster, frighteningly more powerful, and potentially, will draw a lot less power. The current big boy in the world of mobile phone chips is the Toshiba TG01, running a 1GHz processor. With spintronics, just imagine if they can make a 1THz (1 terahertz, or 1,000 GHz), or even a 1PHz (1 petahertz, or 1,000,000GHz). Just imagine a phone that has the processing power (if they can manage a 1PHz processor) of ONE MILLION TOSHIBA TG01s, that’s still only drawing the same amount of power.

God almighty, that would revolutionise every single electronic industry on the planet.

Put it this way, if they ever manage to get computers that powerful, the initials AI won’t stand for Artificial Intelligence any more. Substitute the word Actual into there, and I reckon it’ll be closer to the mark…

It ain’t very often I say this, but spintronics could be a game-changer. And I don’t just mean mobile phones. I mean it’ll change everything, in every corner of the technological world.

Star Trek eat yer heart out!

Do you want a phone with the raw processing power of one million Toshiba TG01s? And if they make one, should they call it Skynet? Leave us a comment and have your say!