December 2009

We've got some more information about the SPIN project we reported on yesterday:

The SPIN project aims at demonstrating the potential impact and competitiveness of a new generation of components incorporating in a single chip nanoscience spintronics elements and CMOS technology. The basic proof of concept has already been brought that integration of these different technologies can provide highly innovative components, with the potential to become generic parts for many different products covering health, energy monitoring, domotics, automotive, aeronautics, and electronics. This project is thus focused on the development of a comprehensive set of three key demonstrators carefully chosen to provide a wide validation of such functionalities. These three objectives share very similar underlying technologies, so there is a large part of common work in their development, and our consortium gathers comprehensive expertise at the leading edge of the area.
Each demonstrator will be delivered with a report on the risk of industrialization, the life time targeted and the security and environmental impact, which will serve as basis for future industrialization.

Objective 1 : Magnetic FPGAs

The objective will be to design a magnetic FPGA which will incorporate finely distributed Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJs) for non volatile storage and configuration purposes above of a CMOS core circuit. In complement of existing high density FPGAs, it will provide better versatility with intrinsic reconfigurability, instant on/off and energy saving. Such FPGAs can be used as general purpose standalone products. In the SPIN project, the FPGA will be targeted to provide intelligent processing of the magnetometers and sensors developed in objectives 2 and 3.

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.

Toshiba announced that it has developed a MOSFET cell based on spintronics. Toshiba has introduced magnetic layers into the source and drain of a MOSFET cell, and successfully applied these to controlling spin direction by the spin-transfer-torque-switching (STS) method, and by applying gate and source/drain voltages. A magnetic tunnel junction is applied for write operation of STS in the magnetic layers, which are formed with full-Heusler alloy, an intermetallic that acts as a high spin polarizer.

Toshiba confirmed the practical performance in transistor level of the scalable spintronics-based MOSFET device that promises fast random write and access speeds with low power consumption. It opens the way to next-generation non-volatile semiconductor devices that can be used as reconfigurable logic devices, and non-volatile LSI chip with memory function.

Toshiba will promote development toward establishing fundamental technologies for application after 2015. This work was partly supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) in Japan.

Prof. Albert Fert (who won the Nobel prize in 2007 for GMR) talks about GMR and Spintronics: