Financial - Page 3

The Graphene Flagship announced a €350,000 work package that explores the potential of graphene spintronics for future devices and applications. The GF is searching for a new partner company to support device development and commercialisation of graphene spintronics, by applying it in specific device architectures dedicated to commercially viable applications and determining the required figures of merits.

The project's budget is for the period 1 April 2016 – 31 March 2018, and includes devices which require optimized (long distance) spin transport, spin-based sensors, and new integrated two-dimensional spin valve architectures. The Graphene Flagship expects that at the start of the Horizon 2020 phase (April 2016), spin injection and spin transport in graphene and related materials will have been characterised and the resulting functional properties will have been understood and modeled.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $500,000 CAREER Award grant for Dr. Claudia Mewes from the towards her spintronics research. The CAREER Award is the NSF’s most prestigious recognition of top-performing young scientists.

Dr. Claudia's research will combine different theories to close the gap between materials design and device performance with the ultimate goal of finding materials that work best in those environments. Dr. Claudia's research includes an educational outreach component looking to increase the number of young girls interested in pursuing careers in science.

The European Research Council (ERC) granted a six-year €9.7 million grant to professor Jairo Sinova from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) for its spintronics research. Professor Sinova will collaborate with researchers from the UK and the Czech Republic.

The project is titled "Spin-charge conversion and spin caloritronics at hybrid organic-inorganic interfaces". The researchers hopes that by combining principles of inorganic spintronics with organic materials (polymers) they will achieve better results than if they used purely inorganic systems. The advantages of using polymers include the flexibility of the material, control over the physical properties, and the fact that they are relatively easy to produce.

Two German universities (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz - JGU, and the University of Kaiserslautern) are collaborating on two Spintronics commercialization research projects (with a combined budget of €3.8 million).

The first project is the establishment of STeP (Spintronic Technology Platform) in Rhineland-Palatinate, which is designed to boost magnetic coating systems R&D. The main focus of the STeP research is into Heusler materials. This new collaboration means that academic research is being immediately transferred onto an industrial production line.

University of Iowa's researcher Michael Flatté has received a five-year, $958,000 contract from C-SPIN to study new Spintronics materials, with an aim to understand the internal dynamics of a magnet, and how magnetic waves within that magnet can be used to carry information quickly and efficiently around a computer chip.

His previous Spintronics research focused on theories of the fundamental magnetic properties of materials and the behavior of electric currents within them, as well as how to use these materials to construct nanoscale electronic circuits that require considerably less power to function.

The Semiconductor Research Corporation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $28 million five-year grant to open the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures, or C-SPIN. This is a multi-university and industry research center that aims to develop technologies for spin-based computing and memory systems. C-SPIN's research areas include perpendicular magnetic materials, spin channel materials (including topological insulators, monolayer MoS2 and graphene), spintronic interface engineering, spin devices and interconnects and spintronic circuits and architectures.

University partners include the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, MIT, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Riverside. Industry partners include IBM, Applied materials, Intel, Texas Instruments and Micron.

Researcher Michel de Jong of the NanoElectronics group (MESA+) in the University of Twente (Netherlands) received a €1.5 million grant from the European Research Council to fund his Spintronics work (this is his second ERC grant). Michel de Jong is focusing on organic materials, in particular in Buckyballs (spherical C60 molecules held together by weak bonds) sandwiched between two magnetic materials.

Michel explains that these molecules have very little effect on electron spin, which is a great advantage as it enables them to store spin information for much longer periods of time than silicon. Buckyballs have also been used to create Graphene Quantum Dots.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) granted a four-year $1.85 million research project to UC Riverside researchers - to develop spin-based memory and logic chip. The researchers are working towards a magnetologic gate that will serve as the engine for the new technology - similar to the role of the transistor in conventional electronics.

The magnetic gate consists of graphene contacted by several magnetic electrodes. Data is stored in the magnetic state of the electrodes, similar to the way data is stored in a magnetic hard drive. For the logic operations, electrons move through the graphene and use its spin state to compare the information held in the individual magnetic electrodes.

A few weeks ago we reported about research from Virginia Commonwealth University - an integrated circuit using spintronics and straintronics. The new IC design uses very little energy - in fact it could run merely by tapping the ambient energy from the environment. Today we learn that the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $1.5 million to this research, in a 4 year grant (from September 2011 to August 2015).

According to the NSF, this project will:

• develop all the modeling tools necessary to simulate these devices and their switching dynamics. They will incorporate the effects of device and circuit stochasticity and thermal fluctuations via appropriate models such as stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equations and/or Fokker-Planck equations.
• Demonstrate Bennett clocking and successful logic bit propagation in a digital gate array fabricated with nanolithography, where clocking is carried out with tiny voltages generating strain
• Design energy-efficient neuromorphic architectures based on multi-state hybrid spintronic/straintronic synapses and neurons that can process analog signals
• Demonstrate image processing with straintronic/spintronic nodes communicating via spin waves to implement specific image morphing algorithms. These image processors will be extremely fast since they will rely on the physics of magnetic interactions between spin wave circuits and the collective activity of multiferroic magnetic cells to elicit the required functionality, without requiring any software or execution of instruction sets.

The University of Utah announced a new $21.5 million basic research center aimed towards "next-generation materials for plasmonics and spintronics". The new "Center of Excellence in Materials Research and Innovation" will be funded by the National Science Foundation ($12.5 million), the Utah Science Technology and Research ($6.5 million) initiative and the University of Utah ($3 million).

The spintronics team wil be lead by Physicist Brian Saam. The research effort will center on developing organic spintronic semiconductors.