Spintronics technology: past, present and future

Spintronics has emerged in the last two decades as both an extremely fruitful direction of research into the properties and usefulness of the spin degree of freedom of the electron as it can apply to the exponentially expanding world of electronics. Spintronics has infiltrated almost every household in the form of the read head sensors for the hard drives that inhabit every desktop and most laptop computers. Embedded magnetic random access memory (MRAM) and in-plane STT-RAM are rapidly replacing SRAM in a host of applications that do not require ultra-dense memories. Soon these embedded spintronic memories will permeate the cell phone market because they are much denser than SRAM, offer lower power at only slightly lower speed and are non-volatile. The present work in spintronics at most of the mainstream semiconductor companies and foundaries is focused on the development of perpendicular STT-MRAM, as a universal memory that can compete with the mainstream memories and surpass them in several key metrics. Several innovative ideas are presented where spintronics may have an impact because of the uniqueness of the approach. Nanomagnetic logic and storage may offer extremely high densities at very low power. Spin-torque oscillators are a very novel approach to pattern recognition that may be relevant for handling massive data sets. The spin of the electron may also be on the critical path for quantum computation or communication, another revolutionary change in how we process information.