Spintronic memories
Dr Stuart S.P. Parkin, Director of Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany, gave a talk on Spintronic memories. He discussed the history and development of magnetic racetrack memory, the materials and physics that make it so exciting and provided a perspective on its future. He also discussed the possibility of chiral spin textures beyond chiral domain walls, namely skyrmions and anti-skyrmions, that could enable future racetrack memory devices.
What are Spintronics and MRAM?
Spintronics is a field of research that concerns spin currents rather than charge currents that are used in conventional electronics. Spintronics is the basis of the ultra-sensitive magnetic field sensors that have been used in magnetic hard disk drives since ~1997, and that has allowed for massive storage capacities that underpin today’s digital world. A second major success of spintronics is Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM), a high-performance non-volatile memory, that uses magnetic tunnel junction memory elements.
This memory, proposed more than 25 years ago, has recently entered the marketplace, for specialized applications. An even more exciting spintronics memory is Magnetic Racetrack Memory (RM) that was proposed in 2002. The basic concept of RM is the storage of data in magnetic domain walls along magnetic nano-wires. Currents passed through these wires, or racetracks, move the domain walls, in step, to and fro along the wires, enabling data to be moved to reading and writing devices built into or adjacent to the racetracks.
This allows for massive data storage densities rivalling those of magnetic disk drives but in a much smaller volumetric form factor, and with much greater reliability, and, at the same time, vastly improved performance. Whilst the basic concept of racetrack memory was first shown in 2008, recent developments in novel materials and physics allow for the current induced motion of chiral domain walls in racetracks at speeds of more than 1 km/s, promising ultra-fast RM devices.
About IEEE Conference
The ICEE-2020 conference at IIT Delhi was the 5th International event in a series that was held successfully earlier at IIT Bombay 2012 & 2016, IISc Bangalore 2014 & 2018. The conference was focused on advancement in the emerging electronics covering all aspects from materials to device to integration in systems.
The conference provided good opportunities for researchers to listen and interact with world-renowned experts in the area. The conference had 158 invited speakers in the conference and out of these, 90 invited speakers are from different foreign countries. More than 400 abstracts were presented as oral and poster presentations. Areas covered, but not limited to were
- 2D materials and devices
- Emerging logic, memories and neuromorphic devices
- Flexible electronics and organic semiconductors
- MEMS/NEMS and microfluidics
- Device modelling and simulation
- Photonics and plasmonics
- Photovoltaics and energy harvesting
- Wide band-gap semiconductors, devices and applications
- Biosensors and bioelectronics
- Spintronic devices for memory and computing
- RF, microwave and terahertz devices
Typical v/s virtual event amidst COVID-19 pandemic
Over 1400 people registered for the conference, which was a good sign since usually the conference used to attract 500 to 600 people, and the virtual event had at least twice of that.
Herein, lied the likes the way forward for the conference, a hybrid kind of an approach in the future. While there could be in-person sessions because after all conferences are meant for networking purposes. So, there can be an in-person kind of presence but also should now start streaming all of the conferences online and have the virtual registrations for more engagement.
IEEE-ICEE conferences has lots of opportunities to learn from the greatest minds in academia! For more info: https://www.ieee.org/
