Washington, July 02: Electrical engineers have indicated that future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics.

Today''s silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets – like tiny refrigerator magnets – for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons.

Such chips would dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, the minimum allowed by the second law of thermodynamics and called the Landauer limit. That''s 1 million times less energy per operation than consumed by today''s computers.

"Today, computers run on electricity; by moving electrons around a circuit, you can process information," said Brian Lambson, a University of California, Berkeley graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

"A magnetic computer, on the other hand, doesn''t involve any moving electrons. You store and process information using magnets, and if you make these magnets really small, you can basically pack them very close together so that they interact with one another. This is how we are able to do computations, have memory and conduct all the functions of a computer,” added Lambson.

The study has been detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters. (ANI)