NVE Corporation said that it has been notified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that two patents are expected to be granted today. The patents are titled "Two-Axis Magnetic Field Sensor" and "Superparamagnetic Devices."
The Two-Axis Magnetic Field Sensor is patent number 7,054,114, and is the grant of a patent under the application published by the USPTO as number 2004-0137275. The invention is for a spintronic device that can detect the magnitude and orientation of magnetic fields. Applications for such devices might include Magnetoresitive Random Access Memory (MRAM), or military, industrial, and medical sensors.
The Superparamagnetic Devices patent is number 7,054,118 and is the first patent granted from the application published by the USPTO under number 2004-0023065. Other patents are possible based on this application, although there can be no assurance if or when additional patents will be granted.
Superparamagnetism is the magnetic state of a material between highly ordered parallel spins (ferromagnetism) and randomly ordered spins (paramagnetism). The superparamagnetic effect occurs in ferromagnetic particles smaller than a critical value or at temperatures higher than a critical temperature. In conventional storage systems such as disk drives, superparamagnetism can be undesirable because it limits storage density. The NVE invention utilizes the superparamagnetic effect to improve the accuracy of spintronic sensors where a small sensed field is sufficient to order the spins in a superparamagnetic material. More accurate sensors would be useful in a number of applications including military, medical, and biosensor.