Opportunities and challenges for spintronics

Abstract

Conventional electronics use the flow of electric charges and are based on standard semiconductors. Spintronic devices exploit the electrons- spin to generate and control currents and to combine electric and magnetic signals. Today there is a strong effort worldwide to integrate spintronic devices with standard CMOS technology towards hybrid spin-CMOS chips, offering advantages in terms of power consumption, compactness, and speed. Recent results (from SAMSUNG [1], TSMC [2], etc.) confirm the merit of this approach.