The Change Mariner

New High-Performance, Low-Power Electronics Dubbed Spintronics

Reed-Electronics.com

IBM has teamed with Stanford University for research and creation of new high-performance, low-power electronics dubbed "spintronics."

To formalize the effort, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Stanford today announced the formation of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center, or SpinAps.

"SpinAps researchers will work to create breakthroughs that could revolutionize the electronics industry, just as the transistor did 50 years ago," said Robert Morris, IBM VP and director of the Almaden Research Center, in a statement.

As IBM explains it, electron spin is a quantum property that has two possible states, either "up" or "down." Aligning spins in a material creates magnetism, and magnetic fields affect the passage of "up" and "down" electrons differently, Big Blue said.

IBM's Almaden lab came out with the first mass-produced spintronic device in 1997, the giant magnetoresistive head. Another multilayered spintronic structure is at the heart of the high-speed, nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM), currently being developed by a handful of companies, according to IBM.