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Researchers at Ohio State University have created the first electronic circuit that combines traditional inorganic semiconductors with organic, polymer-based “spintronics”. Spintronics are devices that exploit the spin of electrons to read, write, and use data.
Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin‘s team combined an inorganic semiconductor with a special plastic material that researchers in Arthur J. Epstein‘s lab are developing. Last year, Epstein’s team had demonstrated the first data storage and retrieval on a plastic spintronic device. Now the teams of Johnston-Halperin and Epstein have joined forces to integrate the plastic device into a traditional gallium arsenide circuit.
In your computer, data are stored based on a binary code of ones and zeros. The code depends on whether an electron is present or not within the semiconductor material.
But researchers have known for a while that electrons can be polarized to point in particular directions. They refer to the orientation as spin — either “spin up” or “spin down”. The exploitation of spin, called spintronics, has been applied to memory-based technologies. An example is a terabyte drives now commercially available.
If spintronic technology could do more than just memory storage, like logic and computing applications, important milestones in information processing would be possible. Compared to modern electronics, spintronics could potentially need much less power, produce much less heat, and let computers turn on immediately without booting up. The devices would also be lighter and more flexible.
But making devices out of disparate types of materials can be very difficult, and industrial savviness with the new polymers has yet to come, as assistant director of research communications Pam Frost Gorder reports in her press release:
“You could ask, why didn’t we go with all organics, then?” Johnston-Halperin said. “Well, the reality is that industry already knows how to make devices out of inorganic materials. That expertise and equipment is already in place. If we can just get organic and inorganic materials to work together, then we can take advantage of that existing infrastructure to move spintronics forward right away.”He added that much work will need to be done before manufacturers can mass-produce hybrid spintronics. But as a demonstration of fundamental science, this first hybrid circuit lays the foundation for technologies to come.
In their recent scientific report in the journal Physical Review Letters, the investigators described how they got a spin-polarized electrical current from a plastic material, which they made from a polymer called vanadium tetracyanoethylene. This electrical current then passed through the gallium arsenide layer and into a light-emitting diode. The demonstration was proof that the organic and inorganic parts were working together.
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