GC: n
CT: Spintronics is “Spin based electronics”. The idea is to use the electron’s spin, as well as it’s charge. Electrons can spin in two directions (Spin-Up, Spin-Down, which is actually clockwise and anti-clockwise), and the spin is detectable as weak magnetic energy. Spintronic device do not need an electric current to retain their “spin”. That means, for example, that MRAM is a non-volatile memory, like FLASH. Spin is more “relaiable”, and such devices will operate better in high temperature or raditation environments. Theoretically Spintronic devices will be smaller, faster and more powerful than electronic ones. Spin-Valves, which are used in Hard-Disks and sensors today, use Spintronics. Also MRAM, which is based on Spintronics, is advancing nicely, and EverSpin (formerly part of Freescale) have started selling 4-Mbit MRAM modules.
S: SPIN – http://www.spintronics-info.com/introduction (last access: 24 November 2016)
N: 1. The neologism was coined in the 1990s meaning spin-transport electronics or spin-based electronics. Also known as magnetoelectronics.
2. Nanotechnology that relies on electron spin to acquire, store and transmit information.
3. Spintronics research flowered following the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect in the late 1980s.
4. Stuart Parkin discovered the fundamental underlying spintronics phenomena that made the spin valve a reality while researching novel properties of superlattices formed from combinations of various magnetic and non-magnetic materials based on flowing charge currents through these superlattices.
5. The first use of spin-valve sensors in hard disk drive read heads was in the IBM ® Deskstar 16GP Titan, which was released in late 1997 with 16.8 GB of storage. These huge increases in storage capacity made possible the evolution of giant data centers in the “cloud.” Perhaps most importantly, the ability to store and access huge amounts of data in worldwide networks helped create the information-based world of today.
6. Stuart Parkin is now leading a team of IBM researchers in studying Racetrack Memory, a radically different non-volatile memory technology proposed by Parkin in 2004 that is based on a recently discovered spintronics phenomena.
7. Spintronics may also enable the leap to quantum computing where units of quantum information known as “qubits” can occupy spin-up and spin-down states simultaneously, and so allow for massive increases in computational power.
8. Cultural Interrelation: We can mention British scientist Prof Stuart Parkin who won the 2014 Millennium technology prize. Parkin’s achievement was to develop a device based on such “spintronic” effects in which tiny magnetic fields from magnetised regions that store data within the disk drive can rotate the direction of magnetisation in one of the layers of the sandwich. The result is a sensor that rapidly experiences large changes in resistance as it reads the disk drive.
S: 1. TSQD p. 337; IBM – https://goo.gl/XDDLR8 (last access: 24 November 2016); Spin – http://www.spintronics-info.com/introduction (last access: 24 November 2016). 2. UKMN – https://goo.gl/8xU96f (last access: 24 November 2016). 3 to 7. IBM – https://goo.gl/3QwZmM (last access: 24 November 2016). 8. TheGuardian – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/09/stuart-parkin-millennium-technology-prize-cloud-computing (last access: 24 November 2016).
SYN: spin electronics, magnetoelectronics, fluxtronics.
S: GDT – http://www.granddictionnaire.com/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=8353124 (last access: 25 November 2016)
