Nanocomputing: From nanowires to nanomagnets

The building block of modern digital computers is the celebrated transistor which is a charge-based switch and whose two stable conductance states encode the binary bits 0 and 1. The two states are demarcated by the amount of charge stored in the transistor’s channel. If more charge is present, the transistor is on and if less charge is present, it is off. When a transistor switches, charges have to flow in and out of the channel, resulting in a current that causes excessive energy dissipation. This dissipation poses a serious threat to Moore’s law and ultimately will stop further downscaling of electronic devices.