January 2009

In the race to develop the next generation of storage and recording media, a major hurdle has been the difficulty of studying the tiny magnetic structures that will serve as their building blocks. Now a team of physicists at the University of California, Davis, has developed a technique to capture the magnetic “fingerprints” of certain nanostructures — even when they are buried within the boards and junctions of an electronic device.

Due to the miniscule physical dimensions of nanomagnets — some are as small as 50 atoms wide — observing their magnetic configurations has been a challenge, especially when they are not exposed but built into a functioning device.

To tackle this challenge, Liu and three of his students, Jared Wong, Peter Greene and Randy Dumas, created copper nanowires embedded with magnetic cobalt nanodisks. Then they applied a series of magnetic fields to the wires and measured the responses from the nanodisks. By starting each cycle at full saturation — that is, using a field strong
enough to align all the nanomagnets — then applying a progressively more negative field with each reversal, they created a series of information-rich graphic patterns known to physicists as “first-order reversal curve (FORC) distributions.”

Researchers in France and the US have lowered the current required for spin transfer down to just 120 microamps at room temperature for a device that measures 45 nm across.

Spin transfer is when the spin angular momentum of charge carriers (usually electrons) in a material is transferred from one place to another. In the MRAM industry, Spin Transfer might help to significantly reduce power consumption, but it draws a large current. But the new technique can help with that. 

Stéphane Mangin from Nancy University and colleagues may fabricated 45 nm diameter spin valves based on cobalt-nickel multilayer elements. Because these devices exhibit perpendicular anisotropy, they are thermally stable and require currents as low as 120 microamps for spin transfer switching without any applied magnetic field.

NVE Corporation announced today financial results for the quarter and nine months ended December 31, 2008.  Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 increased 23% to $5.88 million from $4.77 million in the prior-year quarter. The revenue increase was due to an 8% increase in product sales and a 150% increase in contract research and development revenue. Net income for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 increased 45% to $2.47 million.

NVE reported a strong growth in contract R&D. In the conference call, Daniel Baker (company's CEO) said - "Most of the contracts that we're working on right now are related to anti-tamper MRAM".

The company also announced today that its Board of Directors authorized the repurchase of up to $2.5 million of the company’s common stock from time to time in open market, block, or privately negotiated transactions. 

Researchers in Germany and Latvia show that a single electron pump can be used to manipulate spin. 

For a spintronics device, we need to inject a single elctron with a spin value. The researchers have seen that this is possible. In the current issue of the physics journal Applied Physics Letters, they present investigations of a so-called single electron pump. This semiconductor device allows the ejection of exactly one single electron per clock cycle into a semiconductor channel. In the measurements presented it was shown for the first time that such a single electron pump can also be reliably operated in high magnetic fields. For sufficiently high applied fields, the pump then delivers exactly one single electron with predefined spin polarization per pumping cycle. It thus delivers spin-polarized electrons virtually on demand. The robust design and the high achievable clock rate in the gigahertz range makes such a spin-polarized single electron pump a promising candidate especially also for future spintronic applications. 

Via Nanowerk