A group of electrical engineers at the University of Notre Dame, for the first time have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors.



As transistor-based microchips performance is limited by Moore’s Law, this new chip uses nanoscale magnetic ‘islands’ to juggle the ones and zeroes of binary code.



This means that computers using the chips would boot up almost instantly. The researchers claim that the magnetic chip’s memory is nonvolatile, making it resistant to power interruptions. What’s more, it retains its data when the machine is switched off.



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