SPINTRONICS, ELECTRONICS FOR THE FUTURE?

S. A. Wolf

Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Physics

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA 22904

Research and technology developments in the field of spintronics have grown tremendously in the past 10-15 years and already have had a major impact on the data storage industry both in magnetic disk drives as well as non-volatile random access memory.   The future looks even brighter as many new spintronic discoveries have been made that promise an even bigger impact in the future.  This talk will summarize the past accomplishments; describe some of the major discoveries that will have a lasting impact on future electronics particularly beyond Moore’s Law.  I will describe new directions in magnetic memory both random access and serial mass storage, a novel spin transistor and very high speed nanospintronic devices based on a novel effect called spin momentum transfer.  I will describe the work at the University of Virginia that is aimed at developing a novel quantum dot based magnetic exchange switch that offers a potentially very low power replacement for CMOS.