Moore’s law may be extended by graphene, whose very high electron mobility plus better-than-metal uniformity makes it a perfect candidate for nanoscale spintronic devices. Spintronic devices encode information on the spin of individual electrons instead of the charge of thousands, which can potentially shrink device sizes into smaller, less power-consuming circuitry than silicon, according to Chalmers University of Technology (U.K.) at its Nanofabrication Laboratory.

Today a few devices use spin encoding, including advanced hard drives and magnetic random access memory (MRAM), but these devices only have to move spin-encoded electrons a few nanometers. Unfortunately, copper and aluminum are not uniform enough to encode spin much longer runs, limiting spintronics capabilities. Chalmers University of Technology’s goal is to extend that distance to millimeters so that any digital circuit can use spintronics.

TDK has introduced a prototype of the MRAM memory chips Japanese-held in Chiba, CEATEC trade show. In the memory chips have been read and wrote data about seven times more flash memory faster.

MRAM memory is expected to be replaced to run flash-memory. Its advantages are the dram memory level will reach read and write speeds, but unlike the ram memory, data is retained even after power off.

Although MRAM memory is not actually a new invention, TDK’s presentation of the circuits based on a newer version of stt technology (spin-tansfer torque).

TDK’s rival STT-MRAM circuits development is an American Ever Spin Technologies, whose chips are already used in small amounts, for example, a memory in Buffalo manufactured SSD drives for caching.

Source: http://www.tivi.fi/uutisia/tulevaisuuden+muistitekniikka+mram+nopeaa+kuin+keskusmuisti+mutta+toimii+massamuistina/a1018259

3D Magnet Stack Subs for Transistors
Germany has discovered new type of magnetic gates
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324170&

Remember those magnetic core memories that IBM invented at the beginning of the computer revolution. Well now Germany researchers at Technische Universität (Institute for Technical Electronics, TUM; Munich, Germany) have resurrected an analog of the idea using tiny stacks of nanomagnets to write, store, and readout bits.

The researchers also contend that their 3D magnetic transistor-substitutes could be fabricated into any type of gate on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) lines and are currently inventing magnetic logic techniques that could substitute for CMOS logic and memory functions.

“The material, that can be used is a cobalt/platinum or a cobalt/nickel in a multilayer stack. There are two things that we make sure of: that the material must possesses perpendicular magnetic anisotropy to get a bistable magnetization state of the magnets, and that the anisotropy must be tunable by focused ion-beam irradiation. A cobalt/platinum or a cobalt/nickel multilayer stack fulfills both criteria,”

If you took undergraduate quantum mechanics, at some point you were introduced to the concept of “spin.” If you’re like me, you left that class feeling you were shown a magic trick but not how it worked. Don’t worry; you are not alone. The reason you weren’t told more is not that a better explanation was left for graduate quantum mechanics. You weren’t told more because there isn’t a lot more to know.

Of course, there is the magnetic dipole moment. Shoot a beam of electrons through a magnetic field with a gradient, and the beam will bend thanks to the influence of the field on a moving charge. Furthermore, it will also split into two sub-beams — one containing “spin-up” electrons and the other containing “spin-down” electrons. An oriented magnetic dipole moment in the macro world corresponds to circulating current. Hence, the image of a spinning electron, presumably with a non-uniformly distributed charge that gives rise to the magnetic moment.

But if you do the math with some sort of estimate of electron size, the charge has to be spinning at many times the speed of light, which is not possible. Actually, it’s not clear the electron actually has a size, so what is spinning anyway? Not that the spin isn’t real — you can induce electron spin transitions in an atom with polarized light, and photon spin (circular polarization) is real. But the intuitive explanation for the dipole moment is completely wrong, and we still don’t have any concept of just what is spinning.