Memory - Page 7

Researchers from the University of Nottingham discovered a new antiferromagnetic material that may be the basis of future spintronics devices. The new material is copper manganese arsenide (CuMnAs), has an advantage of ferromagnetic materials - in which strong magnetic fields can erase the encoded information.

The problem with antiferromagnets is that manipulating the magnetic ordering of antiferromagnets is quite difficult - because the spins of neighboring electrons point in opposite directions which means it is not easy to change them with external magnetic fields.

Researchers from MIT and colleagues from the US, Germany France and India discovered that when you combine a topological insulator (bismuth selenide) with a magnetic material (europium sulfide) you create a material that one can can control its magnetic properties. The new material retains the electronic property of the topological insulator and also the full magnetization capabilities of the magnetic material.

The researchers were surprised by the stability of that effect - in fact the material exhibited those great properties at room temperatures, which means that this hybrid material can be used to create spintronics devices.

Researchers from France's Universite Paris-Sud and the CEA institute discovered that the probabilistic nature of Spin-Torque MRAM (STT-MRAM) devices can be used to create synapses-like neural system - effectively to create low-power devices that mimic the human's brain method of operation.

MRAM cells (or MTJs) store data using electrons magnetic spin, which is a stochastic switching type of device - that needs to apply a current for a long-enough time to make sure the information changed as you wish. In this new suggestion, you take advantage of the stochastic switching and apply current for a short time - which can be used to make the device learn progressively. This effectively means that MTJs can be "trained" to learn new information.

Several Universities and commercial companies announced the establishment of a new Spintronics Consortium in Singapore, to be called the Singapore Spintronics Consortium (SG-SPIN). The Consortium will encourage and help researchers to explore innovative spin-based technologies for sensor, memory and logic applications.

The founding members of SG-SPIN are the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Applied Materials, Delta Electronics and GlobalFoundried. The NUS will lead the consortium.

Researchers from the University of Utah have managed to control and read spin information at room temperatures. For this experiment, they used an orange OLED device.

The researchers were able to read the nuclear spins of two hydrogen isotops: a single proton and deuterium (a proton, neutron and electron). When the researchers controlled the spin, they controlled the electrical current in the device.

Researchers at UCLA developed a new nanoscale magnetic component for computer memory chips that could significantly improve their energy efficiency and scalability. The innovative asymmetric structure allows it to better exploit electrons' spin and orbital properties, making it much more power efficient than today's computer memory.

The structure devised at UCLA eliminates the need for an adjacent magnetic field. The researchers instead created an effective magnetic field by varying the angle of the structure by just a few atoms, in a shape resembling a cheese wedge: thicker on one end and sloping downward to a thinner edge on the other end.

Researchers from Japan's RIKEN center discovered that skyrmions can be manipulated thermally using an electron beam. The researcher say that such a method could be used to develop low-energy memory and logic devices - in which the info is coded by the skyrmions.

In ferromagnetic materials, each atom acts like a tiny bar magnet. Usually all those "magnets" point in the same direction, but sometimes they can create skyrmions - "whirls" in the magnetic orientation of those atoms (see image above).

Researchers from North Carolina State University integrated Vanadium Dioxide (currently used to make infrared sensors) as a single crystal on a silicon substrate. This allowed them to develop smart infrared sensors in which the sensor and computational function are embedded on a single chip. Such devices may enable faster and more energy efficient sensors.

In addition to developing a new sensor architecture, the researchers also managed to make the Vanadium Dioxide magnetic using a high-power nanosecond-pulsed laser beam. They hope this will enable them to develop Spintronics sensors that incorporate infrared sensors and magnetic sensors on a single chip.

Researchers from Cambridge showed that superconductors could be used as an energy-efficient source for spintronics devices - this was not believed to be possible by most researchers. Superconducting spintronics devices may enable powerful circuits that consumer very little power (in fact superconductors offer 100% energy efficiency).

The researchers showed that electrons spin can be detected and manipulated in the current flowing from a superconductor. They achieved that feat by adding an intervening magnetic layer (made from Holmium) to the superconductor. This layer allowed them to manipulate the electrons spin.

Researchers from the University of Utah (the same professor whose "Spin Effects in Organic Optoelectronic Devices" talk we just posted on) developed a new platinum-doped polymer that can be used to create light emitting devices, efficient OLEDs and OPVs and perhaps even Spintronics-based memory devices.

The basic idea is to take an organic polymer and insert (dope) platinum atoms at different intervals. Different intervals result in different light colors - including white. So the same molecule can emit different colored light at the same time and thus achieve white light. The researchers created two versions of the same polymer. The Pt-1, which emits violet and yellow light as it has a platinum atom in every unit or link. The Pt-3 has a platinum atom every third unit and it emits blue and orange light. We do not have more information regarding how these materials can be used as Spintronics devices.