Overheating laptops have become a major issue recently, not just because we don’t want to waste energy or have our hard drives fried, we don’t want our laptops to melt or catch fire either. It’s no joke.
Now, Professor Jairo Sinova from Texas A and M University and colleagues from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, Institute of Physics ASCR, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham have come up with a way of cooling laptops which could mean overheating will never cause us any hassle again.
As Laptops are getting more powerful but at the same time they are getting smaller in size, they are heating up and how to deal with that heat becomes a headache Professor Sinova explained in the Journal Nature Physics
“The crux of the problem is the way information is processed. Laptops and some other devices use flows of electric charge to process information, but they also produce heat,” the journal quoted the professor as saying.
“Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop,” he adds. “This also wastes a considerable amount of energy,”
Sinova’s research revealed that one way of dealing with the overheating could be to change the way that information is actually processed in a laptop.
“Our research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect,” said Sinova. “The directions they spin can be used to record and process information.”
The answer to the overheating problem apparently lies in changing the way that that the information is processed.
“The device we designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information we want to process, and then we transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally we are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce,” Sinova explains.
“Transmission is no problem. You can think for comparison that if the old devices could only transmit the information to several hundred feet away, with our device, information can be easily transmitted to hundreds of miles away,” he says. “It is very efficient.”
Sinova’s research could have a massive impact on Information Technology in general.
“This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential,” says Sinova.
“One huge thing is that it is operational at room temperature, which nobody has been able to achieve until now. It may bring in a new and much more efficient way to process information.”
Sounds like progress to me.
