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July 29, 2016

Nanomagnets (Image 2)

Artistic illustration depicting nanomagnets.

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Researchers at the College of Engineering at the University of South Florida have proposed a new form of computing that uses circular nanomagnets to solve quadratic optimization problem orders of magnitude faster than that of a conventional computer.

The field of nanomagnetism has recently attracted tremendous attention as it can potentially deliver low-power, high-speed and dense non-volatile memories. It is now possible to engineer the size, shape, spacing, orientation and composition of sub-100 nanometer magnetic structures. This has spurred the exploration of nanomagnets for unconventional computing paradigms.

A wide range of application domains can be potentially accelerated through this research such as finding patterns in social media, error-correcting codes to Big Data and biosciences.

The research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant (CCF 06-39624) and by NSF grants CNS 05-51621 and CCF 08-29838.

To learn more, see the NSF News From the Field story Nanoscale magnets could compute complex functions significantly faster than conventional computers. (Date image taken: October 2015; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: July 12, 2016) [See related image Here.]

Credit: Ryan Wakefield, USF College of Engineering Publications Designer

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