Intel

Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Latvia have announced "a breakthrough in antiferromagnetic spintronics" that could expand the nanotechnology’s capabilities, which have been limited by their need for excessive power. 

The team showed that introducing boron — a process called B-doping — into magnetoelectric oxides can control magnetic fields at the high temperatures prevalent in electronics. This long has been the “holy grail” of such research, said Christian Binek, Charles Bessey Professor of physics.

Researchers from MIT, Princeton University and Politecnico di Milano have found a way to tune the spin density in diamonds by applying an external laser or microwave beam. These findings could open new possibilities for advanced quantum devices.

Spin defects make crystalline materials highly useful for quantum-based devices such as ultrasensitive quantum sensors, quantum memory devices, or systems for simulating the physics of quantum effects. Varying the spin density in semiconductors can lead to new properties in a material, but this density is usually fleeting and elusive, thus hard to measure and control locally. Now, the team of researchers has found a way to tune the spin density in diamonds, changing it by a factor of two, by applying an external laser or microwave beam. 

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel have made a recent discovery that could change the face of spintronics research.

A spintronics device developed by Professor Capua's lab

They discovered that the most important equation used to describe magnetization dynamics, namely the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation, also applies to the optical domain. Consequently, they found that the helicity-dependent optical control of the magnetization state emerges naturally from their calculations. This is a very surprising result since the LLG equation was considered to describe much slower dynamics and it was not expected to yield a meaningful outcome also at the optical limit.

University of Minnesota researchers, along with a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), recently developed a novel process for making spintronic devices that may have the potential to become the new industry standard for semiconductors chips that are essential to computers, smartphones and many other electronics. The new process will allow for faster, more efficient spintronics devices that can be scaled down smaller than ever before. ​​

“We believe we’ve found a material and a device that will allow the semiconducting industry to move forward with more opportunities in spintronics that weren’t there before for memory and computing applications,” said Jian-Ping Wang, senior author of the paper and professor in the College of Science and Engineering.

A team of researchers at Politecnico di Milano, University Grenoble Alpes and other institutes worldwide have recently demonstrated the non-volatile control of the spin-to-charge conversion in germanium telluride, a known Rashba semiconductor, at room temperature. Their work could have important implications for the future development of spintronic devices.

The Rashba effect, discovered in 1959, entails a momentum-independent splitting of spin bands in two-dimensional condensed matter systems. In ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors, this effect can be reversed by switching the direction of the ferroelectric polarization. The idea that Rashba spin-splitting in these materials can be controlled was confirmed by a series of first-principle calculations by S. Picozzi and later validated in spectroscopic experiments using germanium telluride, which is thus often considered the 'prototype' of the ferroelectric Rashba class of semiconductors.

Researchers at imec and Intel, led by PhD candidate Eline Raymenants, have created a spintronic logic device that can be fully controlled with electric current rather than magnetic fields. The Intel-imec team presented its work at the recent IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).

An electron’s spin generates a magnetic moment. When many electrons with identical spins are close together, their magnetic moments can align and join forces to form a larger magnetic field. Such a region is called a magnetic domain, and the boundaries between domains are called domain walls. A material can consist of many such domains and domain walls, assembled like a magnetized mosaic.

Researchers from Intel and the University of California in Berkeley developed a new scalable spintronics logic deice, which they magneto-electric spin-orbit (MESO) logic device that offers dramatic improvement over current CMOS technology.

Intel says that MESO based logic, compared to CMOS, will offer a superior switching energy (by a factor of 10 to 30), lower switching voltage (by a factor of 5), an enhanced logic density (by a factor of 5) and ultra low standby power (due to the non-volatility of the spin-based device).

Intel's technology and manufacturing group leader, William Holt, says that if Intel wants to keep improving its chips, it will soon have to start using fundamentally new technologies. The company does not know which technology will be adopted, but there are two possible candidates at this stage - Spintronics, and tunneling transistors.

William says that the new technologies will have to be commercialized in four to five years (when Intel moves over to 7-nm production, which is thought to be the limit of silicon transistors), and will initially be used alongside silicon transistors. Intel says we'll need to stop expecting chips to be faster - as the new technologies will mostly benefit the energy efficiency rather than the speed of Intel's future chips.

Georgia Institute of Technology, in collaboration (and sponsorship) from Intel developed a physics-based modeling platform that advances spintronics interconnect research for next-generation computing.

The researchers are focusing on developing spintronics switches with adequate connectivity. They are researching the communicating between spin-logic devices and they demonstrated that interconnects are an even more important challenge for beyond-CMOS switches.

The Semiconductor Research Corporation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $28 million five-year grant to open the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures, or C-SPIN. This is a multi-university and industry research center that aims to develop technologies for spin-based computing and memory systems. C-SPIN's research areas include perpendicular magnetic materials, spin channel materials (including topological insulators, monolayer MoS2 and graphene), spintronic interface engineering, spin devices and interconnects and spintronic circuits and architectures.

University partners include the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, MIT, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Riverside. Industry partners include IBM, Applied materials, Intel, Texas Instruments and Micron.