Toshiba’s spintronics transistor and a new storage mechanism in silicon come to life

In a recent issue of the journal Nature, researchers from the University of Twente, Netherlands, explain how they succeeded in transferring magnetically coded information directly into a semiconductor, for the first time at room temperatures. Meanwhile, Toshiba announced at the International Electronics Devices Meeting (IEDM) it has developed a MOSFET transistor harnessing spintronics, demonstrating stable, fast and low-power performance.

Manipulating electronic spins in room-temperature silicon

Compared to bulky relays or vacuum tubes, today’s electronics is undoubtedly a tremendous leap forward; however, despite constant advancements, representing a bit with a charge requires an high amount of power, part of which is wasted as heat, reducing efficiency and battery life in portable devices. This is where spintronics comes into play, as manipulating the spin of electrons rather than charge could save us a lot in our energy bill and give us far greater autonomy to laptops, iPods and the likes.

Considered by many as a very strong candidate for the next generation of personal electronics, research in spintronics is so active that, these days, an edition of journals like Science or Nature hardly hit the stands without mention of new advancements. Part of the reason for this is also that not much at all is known at this point, making researching spintronics a bit like walking in uncharted territory — a treasure could be hiding around nearly any corner.

Read more . . .

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Tags: electronics devices, electronics research, mosfet transistor, power performance, spintronics, storage mechanism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under 5 Years Out, Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.