Spintronics history

The Early Years

• 1988 - Giant Magnetoresistive Effect (GME) discovered by Albert Fert in France and Peter Gruenberg in Germany.
• 1989 - IBM scientists made a string of key discoveries about the "giant magnetoresistive" effect in thin-film structures.
• 1997 - first GMR (Giant magnetoresistive) Harddisk head introduced by IBM.
• 2000 - University of Buffalo get 10$ million to developr specific ferromagnetic materials for use in "spintronics
• 2001 - University of Arkansas physicists have successfully injected a stream of electrons with identical spins into a semiconductor.
• 2001 - IBM's 'Pixie Dust' Breakthrough to Quadruple Disk Drive Density
• 2002 - A new device allows the polarization (or spin) of an electron to determine the switching of the device
• 2002 - Plastic Shows Promise For Spintronics, Magnetic Computer Memory
• 2003 - Min Ouyang and David Awschalom of the University of California at Santa Barbara have transferred electron spins across molecular ‘bridges’ between quantum dots for the first time.

2004

• February - Jing Shi and colleagues at the University of Utah in the US have made the first organic “spin valve”
• March - A family of silicon-based semiconductors that exhibit magnetic properties has been discovered.
• June - Electrical detection of the spin resonance of a single electron in a silicon field-effect transistor
• July - IBM scientists view a single electron spin with a special atomic force microscope 
• November - The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory have launched a 10-year program in spintronics.

2005

• July - New Spintronic Speed Record - 2GHz MRAM devised.
• July - Discovery of 'Doping' Mechanism in Semiconductor Nanocrystals.

2006

• January - Researchers at the University of Michigan created a computer chip based on the esoteric science of quantum mechanics.
• February - Breakthrough 1.2 Petabyte Spintronics 3.5 Disk Drive.
• July - A team of Princeton scientists has turned semiconductors into magnets by the precise placement of metal atoms within a material from which chips are made.
• July - Freescale begins selling 4-Mbit MRAM.
• September - Spin Hall effect detected at room temperature.

2007

• February - New European Initiative To Develop Spintonics Computing Devices
• April - University of Delaware receives $1.9 million for new spintronics center
• May - First breakthrough in applying spin-based electronics to silicon
• June - UCSD Physicists Devise Viable Design For Spin-Based Electronics
• October - Nobel prize for Giant Magnetoresistance discovery

2008

• April - IBM shows New racetrack memory technology
• June - IBM and ETH Zurich university build joint nanotech lab, with Spintronics as one of the research targets
• October - New research centre in Ohio University will work on Spintronics

2009

• March - Scientists prove the existance of a 'spin battery'
• June - Scientists Discover Magnetic Superatoms
• September - North Carolina Stata University gets a 1.2M$ grant to work on molecular spintronics
• September - Korean researchers created the first first spin field-effect transistor
• November - Researchers manipulated and detected spin at room temperature for the first time
• December - France launches a 4.2M euro large-scale spintronics project

2010

• October: Thermo-Spintronics chips that run on heat are possible
• October - Researchers developed a way to reliably read the spin of a single electron
• December - DARPA grants $8.4 for spin logic technology research

2011

• January - Researchers manage to generate spin current in Graphene
• March - Researchers develop room-temperature spintronics transistors
• March - The ERC grants €1.3 million to CIC nanogune's SPINTROS project
• June - Researchers manufactured a spintronics nano-switch using self-organized magnetic molecules
  
• September - The University of Utah opens a new $21.5 million plasmonics and spintronics research center