NVE Spintronics

Spintronics

Our enabling technology is spintronics...
...a nanotechnology we helped pioneer, which utilizes electron spin rather than electron charge to acquire, store, and transmit information.

We manufacture high-performance spintronic products including sensors and couplers that are used to acquire and transmit data.

Our designs use one of two types of patented spintronic nano-scale structures: tunneling magnetoresistors (TMR) and giant magnetoresistors (GMR). Both structures produce a large change in electrical resistance depending on the predominant spin of electrons in a thin metal layer. In this way electron spin can be converted to an electrical signal compatible with conventional electronics.

Spintronics has four key advantages over conventional, charge-based semiconductors: unprecedented miniaturization of medical and other devices; precision and sensitivity for high-accuracy sensing; unmatched reliability because electron spin states are persistent and charge states are not; and low power since no energy is required to maintain electron spin.

Established spintronics applications include medical devices and factory automation. Emerging applications include the Industrial Internet of Things, which is driving the “fourth wave” of industrial automation; and power conversion, which is facilitating an unprecedented transformation from fossil fuels to zero-carbon electricity.

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of GMR. The Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics noted, “most important is that the discovery [of GMR] started the field of spintronics, that is, how to make use of the different properties that electrons with different spin have. The full applications of this new field can only be guessed.”

Technical Videos: