The University of Santa Barbara (UCSB) received $14.5 million from the U.S. Department of Defense (specifically from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research) investigate nano-scale computer chips and quantum computing. $7 million will go to UCSB’s Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation. This center is led by David Awschalom. Here's David with a great introduction to Spintronics and Diamonds:

The European Research Council granted €1.3 million to Spain's CIC nanogune's SPINTROS project - as it has been awarded the Starting Grant prize for innovation ideas in electronics. CIC Nanogune is a new nanotech research center in the Basque Country, Spain.

The Spintros (Spin Transport in Organic Semiconductors) project aims to explore news materials and functions in order to design and develop new electronic devices. The project focuses on the design tasks, manufacture and study of electronic devices at a nanometric scale in just one molecule.

Hitachi says they will double their R&D activities outside Japan - adding around 150 to 300 employees in the next fiscal year. As part of that effort, Hitachi will straighten its Spintronics research, in the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory.

Dr. Colm Durkan from Cambridge University has been awarded funding from the Samsung Global Research Outreach (GRO) programme, for research and development of novel magnetic devices for information processing.

Colm and his team are interested in the fundamentals underpinning Spintronics. Colm says; 'There is a large scientific community investigating novel materials for data storage, whereas our interest is in the size effect of soft magnetic materials in general. Our expertise is specifically in the fabrication and functional characterization of nanostructures by scanning probe microscopy, combined with state-of-the art modeling.'

Professor Russell Cowburn from the Imperial College in London has been awarded €2.8 million to work on spintronics, with the aim of developing new microchips that can store thousands of times more data than today’s microchips.

Professor Cowburn hopes to develop chips that hold many active components stacked on top of each other, allowing more data to be stored in the same sized chip.

NVE Corporation announced their last financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2010. Total revenue in the quarter were $8.18 million (compared to $6.9 in the prior-year quarter). Net income was $3.6 million.

For fiscal 2010, total revenue increased 20% to $28.1 million from $23.4 million for the prior fiscal year. The increase was due to a 15% increase in product sales and a 50% increase in contract research and development revenue. Net income for fiscal 2010 increased 23% to $12.0 million.

The French National Research Agency (ANR) has announced its support to the SPIN project (SPintronics for Innovative Nanotechnologies) - which aims at demonstrating the potential impact and competitiveness of a new generation of devices incorporating in a single chip (3D) spintronics elements and CMOS technology. The project's budget is 4.2M euro, and has 11 partners.

Combined with CMOS circuits, Spintronics could offer discriminating benefits over pure CMOS counterparts. Basic proofs of concept mixing these two technologies have already been demonstrated and yielded highly innovative components as building blocks for many different products covering health, energy monitoring, domestics, automotive, aeronautics, and electronics. Beside non volatile logic developments, two new important needs have recently emerged where Spintronics components could be essential: arrays of ultra sensitive, low noise magnetic sensors for medical applications and in particular for biochips, and compact arrays of magnetic sensors with high galvanic insulation for current and voltage non contact monitoring. These magnetic sensors are based on the spin-valve technology, an industrial derivative of the well-known GMR effect. CMOS integration of spin valve devices for achieving extended control, high reproducibility and low cost is the main challenge for wide implementation of these devices for magnetic sensing. Partners of the SPIN consortium have already developed proofs of concepts of these devices in the prior projects.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted $450,000 to a pair of Florida State University scientists to perform advanced measurements on semiconductors developed by colleagues in China. Their goal is to determine whether electron spin can be harnessed in such a way that future computers and other high-tech electronic devices would require far less power to run.

NVE Corporation announced today financial results for the quarter and six months ended September 30, 2009. TOtal revenue increased 14% to $6.51M, and net income increased 17% to $2.69M

Researchers at North Carolina State University have received a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Center for Chemical Innovation (NSF-CCI) to pursue research in the emerging field of molecular spintronics.