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. We have also licensed our spintronic magnetoresistive random access memory technology, commonly known as MRAM.
Our designs use one of two types of patented spintronic nano-scale structures: spin-dependent tunnel junctions 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.
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 (for example, magnetic random access memories for computers) of this new field can only be guessed.
Technical Videos:



References and additional reading:
Awschalom et. al., "Spintronics," Scientific American, 6/02 [subscription required]
S. Wolf, "Spintronics Introduction," WTEC, 11/01
D. D. Awschalom, R. A. Buhrman, and J. M. Daughton (contributors), Spin Electronics, Published by Springer, 2004).
How Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) works
How spintronic couplers work
How MRAM works