Spintronics: computation and memory technology using electron spin

The French National Research Agency (ANR) has announced its support to the SPIN project (SPintronics for Innovative Nanotechnologies) - which aims at demonstrating the potential impact and competitiveness of a new generation of devices incorporating in a single chip (3D) spintronics elements and CMOS technology. The project's budget is 4.2M euro, and has 11 partners.

Combined with CMOS circuits, Spintronics could offer discriminating benefits over pure CMOS counterparts. Basic proofs of concept mixing these two technologies have already been demonstrated and yielded highly innovative components as building blocks for many different products covering health, energy monitoring, domestics, automotive, aeronautics, and electronics. Beside non volatile logic developments, two new important needs have recently emerged where Spintronics components could be essential: arrays of ultra sensitive, low noise magnetic sensors for medical applications and in particular for biochips, and compact arrays of magnetic sensors with high galvanic insulation for current and voltage non contact monitoring. These magnetic sensors are based on the spin-valve technology, an industrial derivative of the well-known GMR effect. CMOS integration of spin valve devices for achieving extended control, high reproducibility and low cost is the main challenge for wide implementation of these devices for magnetic sensing. Partners of the SPIN consortium have already developed proofs of concepts of these devices in the prior projects.

Toshiba announced that it has developed a MOSFET cell based on spintronics. Toshiba has introduced magnetic layers into the source and drain of a MOSFET cell, and successfully applied these to controlling spin direction by the spin-transfer-torque-switching (STS) method, and by applying gate and source/drain voltages. A magnetic tunnel junction is applied for write operation of STS in the magnetic layers, which are formed with full-Heusler alloy, an intermetallic that acts as a high spin polarizer.

Toshiba confirmed the practical performance in transistor level of the scalable spintronics-based MOSFET device that promises fast random write and access speeds with low power consumption. It opens the way to next-generation non-volatile semiconductor devices that can be used as reconfigurable logic devices, and non-volatile LSI chip with memory function.

Prof. Albert Fert (who won the Nobel prize in 2007 for GMR) talks about GMR and Spintronics:

David Awschalom of the University of California brings us a good introduction to Spintronics:

Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have demonstrated the manipulation and detection of spin-polarized electrons in silicon at room temperature (150C warmer than what was previously achieved). 

The team used careful design of the interface where the electrons enter the silicon - the materials must be pure and of a precisely determined thickness in order to preserve the delicate spin polarization. This is an important step towards spintronic-electronics.

Via BBC News

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted $450,000 to a pair of Florida State University scientists to perform advanced measurements on semiconductors developed by colleagues in China. Their goal is to determine whether electron spin can be harnessed in such a way that future computers and other high-tech electronic devices would require far less power to run. 

Via Medical News Today

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati has developed a novel way to control the spin of electrons using pure electric means. Before the researchers made their breakthrough, the only way to control the spin of electrons was by using local ferromagnets in device architectures. The scientists say that this technique results in design complexities when the demands for electronics require smaller and smaller transistors.

The team used a device called a quantum point contact. Philippe Debray, research professor in the Department of Physics in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences said "We used a quantum point contact — a short quantum wire — made from the semiconductor indium arsenide to generate strongly spin-polarized current by tuning the potential confinement of the wire by bias voltages of the gates that create it."

Professor Kohei Itoh of Keio University gives a lecture on Silicon Quantum Information Processing.

Lecture includes topics such as Elements of quantum computation, Nuclear spin coherence in Silicon and Silicon spintronics.