Spintronics

Spintronics, sometimes called spin electronics or spin transport electronics, is the study of the inherent spin and magnetic moment of the electron in addition to its fundamental electrical charge in solid-state devices. Spintronics is a portmanteau term. The study of spin-charge coupling in metallic systems falls under the umbrella of spintronics, whereas multiferroics studies equivalent processes in insulators. Spintronics fundamentally varies from traditional electronics in that electron spins are used as a second degree of freedom in addition to charge state, having consequences for the effectiveness of data storage and transport. The fields of quantum computing and neuromorphic computing are particularly interested in spintronic devices, which are most frequently realised in diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) and Heusler alloys. Motorola created an initial 256 kb with a read/write cycle of under 50 nanoseconds, magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) is based on a single magnetic tunnel junction and a single transistor. A 4 Mb version was later created by Everspin. The thermal-assisted switching (TAS) and spin-transfer torque technologies for second-generation MRAM are currently in development (STT). Racetrack memory is a different approach that uses the domain walls of a ferromagnetic wire to encode information in the direction of magnetization. In 2012, it was possible to make persistent spin helices of synchronised electrons last for longer than a nanosecond, a 30-fold improvement over prior attempts and longer than the time interval of a current processor clock cycle.