Financial - Page 4

The National Science Foundation (NSF) granted a four-year $1.85 million research project to UC Riverside researchers - to develop spin-based memory and logic chip. The researchers are working towards a magnetologic gate that will serve as the engine for the new technology - similar to the role of the transistor in conventional electronics.

The magnetic gate consists of graphene contacted by several magnetic electrodes. Data is stored in the magnetic state of the electrodes, similar to the way data is stored in a magnetic hard drive. For the logic operations, electrons move through the graphene and use its spin state to compare the information held in the individual magnetic electrodes.

A few weeks ago we reported about research from Virginia Commonwealth University - an integrated circuit using spintronics and straintronics. The new IC design uses very little energy - in fact it could run merely by tapping the ambient energy from the environment. Today we learn that the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $1.5 million to this research, in a 4 year grant (from September 2011 to August 2015).

According to the NSF, this project will:

• develop all the modeling tools necessary to simulate these devices and their switching dynamics. They will incorporate the effects of device and circuit stochasticity and thermal fluctuations via appropriate models such as stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equations and/or Fokker-Planck equations.
• Demonstrate Bennett clocking and successful logic bit propagation in a digital gate array fabricated with nanolithography, where clocking is carried out with tiny voltages generating strain
• Design energy-efficient neuromorphic architectures based on multi-state hybrid spintronic/straintronic synapses and neurons that can process analog signals
• Demonstrate image processing with straintronic/spintronic nodes communicating via spin waves to implement specific image morphing algorithms. These image processors will be extremely fast since they will rely on the physics of magnetic interactions between spin wave circuits and the collective activity of multiferroic magnetic cells to elicit the required functionality, without requiring any software or execution of instruction sets.

The University of Utah announced a new $21.5 million basic research center aimed towards "next-generation materials for plasmonics and spintronics". The new "Center of Excellence in Materials Research and Innovation" will be funded by the National Science Foundation ($12.5 million), the Utah Science Technology and Research ($6.5 million) initiative and the University of Utah ($3 million).

The spintronics team wil be lead by Physicist Brian Saam. The research effort will center on developing organic spintronic semiconductors.

Plures Technologies announced that it will merge with CMSF Corporation, a publicly traded company with no significant operations. This means that the Plures will become a public company (OTCBB:CMSF). The public company will be called Plures Technologies. Plures main business it its 95% stake in Advanced MicroSensors Corporation (AMS). AMS is a semiconductor foundry, which develops and fabricates MEMS and spintronics solutions.

AMS's magnetic sensor product line uses magnetoresistive (AMR, GMR) materials and magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs). According to the company, their sensors exhibit excellent performance, and they outperform traditional Hall Effect devices with regard to size, power, sensitivity, accuracy and resolution.

The University of Santa Barbara (UCSB) received $14.5 million from the U.S. Department of Defense (specifically from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research) investigate nano-scale computer chips and quantum computing. $7 million will go to UCSB’s Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation. This center is led by David Awschalom. Here's David with a great introduction to Spintronics and Diamonds:

The European Research Council granted €1.3 million to Spain's CIC nanogune's SPINTROS project - as it has been awarded the Starting Grant prize for innovation ideas in electronics. CIC Nanogune is a new nanotech research center in the Basque Country, Spain.

The Spintros (Spin Transport in Organic Semiconductors) project aims to explore news materials and functions in order to design and develop new electronic devices. The project focuses on the design tasks, manufacture and study of electronic devices at a nanometric scale in just one molecule.

Hitachi says they will double their R&D activities outside Japan - adding around 150 to 300 employees in the next fiscal year. As part of that effort, Hitachi will straighten its Spintronics research, in the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory.

Dr. Colm Durkan from Cambridge University has been awarded funding from the Samsung Global Research Outreach (GRO) programme, for research and development of novel magnetic devices for information processing.

Colm and his team are interested in the fundamentals underpinning Spintronics. Colm says; 'There is a large scientific community investigating novel materials for data storage, whereas our interest is in the size effect of soft magnetic materials in general. Our expertise is specifically in the fabrication and functional characterization of nanostructures by scanning probe microscopy, combined with state-of-the art modeling.'

Professor Russell Cowburn from the Imperial College in London has been awarded €2.8 million to work on spintronics, with the aim of developing new microchips that can store thousands of times more data than today’s microchips.

Professor Cowburn hopes to develop chips that hold many active components stacked on top of each other, allowing more data to be stored in the same sized chip.

NVE Corporation announced their last financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2010. Total revenue in the quarter were $8.18 million (compared to $6.9 in the prior-year quarter). Net income was $3.6 million.

For fiscal 2010, total revenue increased 20% to $28.1 million from $23.4 million for the prior fiscal year. The increase was due to a 15% increase in product sales and a 50% increase in contract research and development revenue. Net income for fiscal 2010 increased 23% to $12.0 million.