Spintronic – The New Electronic? Part 2

Spintronic – The New Electronic? Part 2

Four strands

“Normally, you find a property or material and then develop a device to exploit it. We wanted to speed up the process by developing the concept devices in a lab now so they are ready when the appropriate material is found,” says Gould.

There were four strands to the team’s work: writing information to ferromagnetic semiconductors, retrieving it, high-speed switching between different states and the theoretical modelling of the devices to explain their operation and allow for optimisation.

“We were essentially looking at devices for memory and storage of information using ferromagnetic semiconductors,” Gould notes. The project was very successful, and generated a lot of interest from industry.

“IBM, Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital have all expressed interest in our work, and Hitachi was a partner in Nanospin,” says Gould. For now, work continues and, while the Nanospin project is over, the partners are continuing to collaborate through a Marie Curie European network called SemiSpinNet.

“Currently, we are looking at logic schemes for spintronics, so we are moving from memory and storage to processing,” says Gould.

The Nanospin project received funding from the Sixth Framework Programme for research’s FET – Open initiative.

This is a very promising research for the future.

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