Argonne Tech Transfer Highlights, Vol. Tech Transfer Highlights Vol. But turn off the power, and the charge disappears along with the information. That s why computer users have to save data to a magnetic hard drive before shutting down a computer. Magnetic spintronic devices, on the other hand, would use an electron s spin to store information.
Magnets tend to stay magnetized when power is shut off.
Argonne's approach uses voltage changes to flip the spins of the electrons the storage elements in magnetic RAM devices up or down to represent the zeros and ones of binary computer language. By combining this with another Argonne idea magnetic, programmable CPUs it could be possible to create pocket-sized computers more powerful than today s most advanced machines. Argonne's research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Materials Sciences Division.