Spintronics crusade features Stanford MBE team
The MBE laboratory at Stanford University in California will be a key element of a new research project that aims to find the successor technology to silicon CMOS.
The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics, which features some of California's top university research groups, will focus on spintronics under the directorship of Kang Wang, a professor of engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
"Simply put, today's devices, which are based on CMOS, can't get much smaller and still function properly and effectively. That's where spintronics comes in," explained Wang.
The project, which also involves the University of California campuses at Santa Barbara and Berkeley, has already received $14.4 million in funding from the semiconductor industry. Commercial partners include Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments, AMD, Freescale and Micron.
Stanford's spintronics team includes James Harris, who has specialized in dilute nitride structures in the past. Harris says that the Stanford effort will be largely based around its ongoing collaboration with IBM. Both IBM and Stanford have MBE expertise.
The new institute, which is headquartered at UCLA, has been set up to help define the successor to silicon CMOS as the semiconductor industry looks to ensure the continuation of Moore's Law. Spintronics is just one technology that may become this successor.
While current information technology relies on the transfer of charge, spintronics instead uses the spin of an electron to carry information.
By using electron spin as the information carrier, devices such as FETs could potentially be switched at much higher speeds and lower powers.
ZnO and III-V compounds are among the materials that have been investigated for such applications (see related story).
