Financial

A team of researchers, led by University of Central Florida Pegasus Professor of Physics Enrique Del Barco, is working on a new project that aims to make  electronics faster and more energy efficient. The work is funded by a new $1.3 million award from the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the team includes researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, New York University and University of California, Riverside.

Today’s electronics, from smartphones to electric cars, generate large amounts of heat as electrical currents flow through their components. This heat not only wastes energy but also damages devices over time. The researchers are addressing this issue by developing materials that allow electricity to move through devices without creating heat, potentially transforming how technology is built and powered.

A new project called MultiSpin.AI was launched in February 2024 and will go on for a period of three years. The project has secured funding totaling more than three million euros from the EIC Pathfinder funding program.

MultiSpin.AI proposes to apply spintronics to the field of artificial intelligence. Processing units will be developed for electrical circuits based on magnetic tunnel junctions. This is a quantum phenomenon that allows electrons to behave in ways not foreseen in classical physics, being able to cross obstacles that, under ‘usual’ conditions, they would not have enough energy to overcome.

The EU project 2DSPIN-TECH aims to pave the way for significantly faster and more energy-efficient computer memories. Last week, the project kickoff event took place, with seven partners and €4 million in funding. The project spans three years and is conducted within the framework of the EU’s Graphene Flagship, a multibillion-dollar initiative launched over a decade ago to stimulate research and innovation in graphene and other two-dimensional materials.

“Our ambition is to create novel spintronic memory devices based on two-dimensional quantum materials, significantly reducing energy consumption, promoting sustainability, and enhancing the overall performance of computer memories. This is crucial for the future of information technology,” says Saroj Dash, Professor of quantum component physics at Chalmers University of Technology and coordinator of 2DSPIN-TECH.

Sensor specialist startup Neuranics has secured a $2.3 million investment led by Par Equity. GU Holdings, the investment company for the University of Glasgow, Old College Capital, the University of Edinburgh’s venture investment fund, and London-based Creator Fund, who back scientific founding teams, also participated in the pre-seed round.

Founded in 2021 as a joint spinout from the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, Neuranics develops pioneering magnetic sensors integrated with semiconductor technology for health, fitness, and metaverse applications. Neuranics’s patented technology uses scalable spintronics sensors powered by semiconductors to detect tiny magnetic signals from organs in the body – for example the heart and muscles of the arms, which the company says could transform the current shortcomings of health monitoring devices and human-machine interfaces.

A new $7.5 million project, led by the University of Michigan, will embrace lines of shifted atoms, or dislocations, in electronic materials (which have long been considered detrimental due to their tendency to impede the flow of electricity), and use them to possibly enable faster and more efficient information processing.

Funded by the Department of Defense, the project aims to understand how dislocations could be used as nano-pipelines to channel electrons while manipulating their spins. The project also involves researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A joint Collaborative Research Centre between Leipzig University and Chemnitz University of Technology will receive multi-million funding. The Collaborative Research Centre, to be known as HYP*MOL, will bring together 29 professors and early career researchers from both universities, as well as other external research partners, to study electron and nuclear spin hyperpolarization in molecular systems.

“This funding is both a cause for celebration and a great incentive for everyone involved,” says Professor Eva Inés Obergfell, Rector of Leipzig University. “Hyperpolarization is an exciting and rapidly evolving field of research. I believe that our research team will contribute new insights that will be appreciated at an international level.” Leipzig University is now involved in 16 Collaborative Research Centres and represents five of them. “This is something to be proud of and should encourage us to submit more applications.”

A research team from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK) has been awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop spintronic devices.

Professor Dr. Mathias Weiler, lead of the study, will receive €2 million over the next five years. Scientists are working on spin waves and new spintronic devices that could drastically accelerate the storage, processing, and transmission of information.

Qnami, a Switzerland-based company that develops fundamental new technology using quantum mechanics, has announced the closing of a &4.4 Million USD Series A financing round.

The company intends to use the funds to extend its patented quantum microscope technology into applications enabling the design and production of quantum computers and spintronics devices, plus scaling the launch of the Qnami ProteusQ™, its first commercial Quantum Microscope.

A research team at NTU’s School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and School of Materials Science and Engineering, led by Associate Professor Gao Weibo, together with colleagues from the Singapore University of Technology and Design, has won substantial funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation to develop high-performance spintronics devices.

The five-year programme, called “The next generation of spintronics with 2D heterostructures”, aims to develop spintronics devices based on next-generation van der Waals materials, which are strongly bonded two-dimensional (2D) layers of materials that are bound in the third dimension through weaker van der Waals forces.

The European Research Council (ERC) granted a €1.9 million new project to Prof. Can Onur Avci, in the field of magnetic insulators for spintronics devices. Prof. Aci will move to ICMAB and be integrated at the ICMAB Research Line 3 (RL3) “Oxides for new generation electronics”. The activities of this research center span from multiferroics, flexoelectric materials oxide photonics and spintronics to ferroelectric memory arrays and GHz-THz magnetoelectrics.

The awarded project is called MAGNEPIC, or “Magnetic Insulators: An Enabling Platform for Innovative Spintronic Concepts”. The project full goal is to study magnetic insulators to develop novel device concepts and explore emerging physical phenomena that could be useful for future spintronics research and applications.