Financial

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.

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 at North Carolina State University have received a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Center for Chemical Innovation (NSF-CCI) to pursue research in the emerging field of molecular spintronics.

The grant will fund a center for molecular spintronics at NC State and support a research coalition between scientists at NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill with the aim of using this technology to develop smaller, faster, more energy-efficient electronic devices with increased storage capability.

NVE corporation reported their financial results for 1Q 2009. Total revenue increased to 7.83M$, and profit was 2.94$.

The main increase in revenue is due to a 22% increase in product sales and 311% increase in contract R&D revenue.

UK researchers (from the University of Surrey and two more institutes) have been awared a 430,000GBP (around 700K$), 3-year grant to develop silicon structures for spintronic semiconductors. This is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Science Foundation of China

The project could lead to cheaper and more sophisticated computer processing technologies.While silicon has not been the material of choice for spintronic research, the team says exploration of silicon based platforms is important due to the potential for exploiting an extremely pure material and the far cheaper and more sophisticated processing technologies available.
The project will focus on manipulating electron spins with laser beams will look to build a prototype device. 

Via NewElectronics

We just hear that Atomistix went bankrupt, and QuantumWise has bought all assets. QuantumWise is a start-up born at the Nano-Science Center and the E-Science Center at Copenhagen University in Denmark.

QuantumWise develops software which in particular can be used for research related to future electronic devices such as transistors and memory circuits. This paves the way for computers and storage devices with radically better performance and capacity than today. 

Via University of Copenhagen

NVE Corporation announced today financial results for the quarter and nine months ended December 31, 2008.  Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 increased 23% to $5.88 million from $4.77 million in the prior-year quarter. The revenue increase was due to an 8% increase in product sales and a 150% increase in contract research and development revenue. Net income for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 increased 45% to $2.47 million.

NVE reported a strong growth in contract R&D. In the conference call, Daniel Baker (company's CEO) said - "Most of the contracts that we're working on right now are related to anti-tamper MRAM".

Grandis announced that it has been awarded $6.0 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the initial phase of research to develop spin-transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM) chips (for the 45 nm technology node and beyond). The total value of the effort, if all phases of the development program are completed, could be up to $14.7 million over four years.

For the first six months of fiscal 2009, total revenue increased 9% to $10.6 million from $9.71 million for the first six months of fiscal 2008. The revenue increase was primarily due to a 10% increase in product sales to $9.42 million for the first half of fiscal 2009 from $8.58 million for the prior-year period.