Researchers at Tohoku University, Japan, have announced the first spintronic microcontroller of its kind that shows us wonders of energy efficiency. The microcontroller is based on VLSI technology, which exploits the effects and phenomena of spintronics, so the new microcontroller consumes only 50 microWatts of power when running at 200 MHz, far outperforming any other existing microprocessor or microcontroller in this regard.
Such high-performance microcontrollers are the ideal solution for distributed sensor networks that collect information and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, which are more demanding in terms of minimizing their power consumption. Some of the most efficient microcontrollers in existence can handle roughly the same level of power consumption as the new spintronic microcontroller. But conventional microcontrollers run at a much lower clock frequency, reducing their data processing capability and narrowing the bandwidth of the signals they process.
With the new VLSI technology, all microcontroller modules are separate, non-volatile spinning devices. Also, the power consumption is positively affected by the fact that the central module individually controls the power supply to each peripheral module, which due to its non-volatile nature continues to retain its state and data even when there is no power supply.
The bottleneck of all existing microprocessor architectures, the data bus between the computational core and memory, is “decoupled” through the use of a specialized memory controller. The reconfigurable gas pedal module significantly speeds up signal processing by performing typical functions at the hardware level. All these new features and innovations mean that the microcontroller only consumes 47.14 microWatts of power when running at 200MHz, which is already powerful enough to handle relatively heavy computational demands.
Finally we can say that the new spintron microcontroller is today the clear leader in terms of performance to energy consumption ratio. This, in turn, will make it possible in the future to create sufficiently powerful nodes of Internet of Things networks, which will work exclusively from external sources of energy, such as solar energy or thermal energy from the environment.
