ABSTRACT
The field of semiconductor electronics has been based exclusively on the manipulation of charge. The remarkable advances in performance have been due in large part to size scaling, i.e. systematic reduction in device dimensions, enabling significant increases in circuit density. This trend, known as Moore’s Law [1], is likely to be curtailed in the near future by practical and fundamental limits. Consequently, there is keen interest in exploring new avenues and paradigms for future technologies. Spintronics, or the use of carrier spin as a new degree of freedom in an electronic device, represents one of the most promising candidates for this paradigm shift [2, 3]. Like charge, spin is an intrinsic fundamental property of an electron, and is one of the alternative state variables under consideration on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) for processing information in the new ways that will be required beyond the ultimate scaling limits of the existing silicon-based complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology [4].
