Opportunities and challenges for spintronics

Conventional electronics use the flow of electric charges and are based on standard semiconductors. Spintronic devices exploit the electrons’ spin to generate and control currents and to combine electric and magnetic signals. Today there is a strong effort worldwide to integrate spintronic devices with standard CMOS technology towards hybrid spin-CMOS chips, offering advantages in terms of power consumption, compactness, and speed. Recent results (from SAMSUNG [1], TSMC [2], etc.) confirm the merit of this approach.