Spintronics: The Future of Energy-Efficient Computing

How Spintronics Could Revolutionize Computing

Progressively, the world of hardware computing is starting to look beyond silicon chips, or even classical forms of binary computing altogether. This is because the usual chips and memory in our computers and data centers are getting increasingly difficult to build, with the latest generation having transistors barely a few nanometers in size.

Another factor is that energy consumption is becoming an issue as the demand for computing power, particularly for AI systems, continues to grow.

There are many proposed solutions, with quantum computing and photonics being the most prominent options to either reduce the demand for computing or make it faster and less energy-intensive.

Another is spintronics, which utilizes the spin of electrons, a quantum characteristic, instead of the electric current (the flow of electrons).

Scientists are working on making spintronics so efficient that it could replace a significant portion of our computing needs.

A recent scientific paper by researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), the Seoul National University, the Kunsan National University (Korea), the Yonsei University, and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) has found that spin loss can be converted back into magnetisation, making spintronics electronics even more energy-efficient.

They published their results in Nature Communications¹, under the title “Magnetization switching driven by magnonic spin dissipation”.

Another recent discovery by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (China), ShanghaiTech University, and Beihang University was how to use imperfections in spintronic materials to make electronics faster, smarter, and more efficient.

They published their results in Nature Materials², under the title “Unconventional scaling of the orbital Hall effect”.

Spintronics Advantages and Potential Applications

Electronic components, such as transistors, are traditionally built from silicon and rely on semiconductors. The 0 and 1 signals in binary indicate the passing or blocking of an electric current.

An alternative way to perform computation is through spintronics devices, which run on the spin of electrons (a fundamental quantum characteristic) rather than the electric current (the flow of electrons).

Source: Insight IAS

Data can be encoded in both the spin angular momentum, which can be imagined as a built-in “up” or “down” orientation of the electron, and orbital angular momentum, which describes how electrons move around atomic nuclei.

Because this contains more information than just 0 & 1, spin can contain more data per atom than traditional electronics.

Spintronics has a few other advantages over classical electronic systems, notably:

• Faster data, as spin can be changed much quickly.
• Less energy consumption, as spin can be changed with less power than it takes to maintain a flux of electrons to create a current.
• Simple metals can be used instead of complex semiconductor materials.
• Spin is less volatile than the semiconductor status, making the data storage more stable.

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Spintronics is already used for hard drives and has allowed data storage capacity to grow over the last decade.

“Spin is a quantum mechanical property of electrons, which is like a tiny magnet carried by the electrons, pointing up or down.

We can leverage the spin of electrons to transfer and process information in so-called spintronics devices.”

Talieh Ghiasi – Postdoc Researcher at Delft University of Technology

Overcoming Material Challenges in Spintronics

Despite these advantages, spintronics are yet to gain commercial traction. This is in part due to the role of material defects. Introducing imperfections into a material can sometimes make it easier to “write” data into memory bits by reducing the current needed.

However, these defects also increase electrical resistance and reduce spin Hall conductivity, making the use of spin to encode data significantly more challenging.

A solution might be to use strontium ruthenate (SrRuO3), a transition metal oxide whose properties can be finely tuned.

Careful engineering of defects in the material using custom-designed devices and precision measurement techniques changes how spins react to them.

“Scattering processes that typically degrade performance actually extend the lifetime of orbital angular momentum, thereby enhancing orbital current.”

Dr. Xuan Zheng – Chinese Academy of Sciences

This is radically different from conventional spin-based systems. In these experiments, tailored conductivity modulation yielded a 3x improvement in switching energy efficiency.

“This work essentially rewrites the rulebook for designing these devices. Instead of fighting material imperfections, we can now exploit them.”

Prof. Zhiming Wang – Chinese Academy of Sciences

Energy-Efficient Computing with Spintronics

Magnetism And Spin

With spin a characteristic of the electron particles, it is maybe not surprising that researchers are finding new connections between spin and the magnetization of electronic materials.

The Korean researchers were studying this connection. Traditionally, switching the magnetization of an electronic component between 1 and 0 requires large currents to reverse the direction of magnetization. This process results in spin loss, which has been considered a major source of power waste and poor efficiency.

Instead of trying to mitigate this loss and reduce spin dissipation, they look to use it by combining a single ferromagnetic metal with an antiferromagnetic insulator.

Source: Nature Materials

Source: Nature Materials

Spin Currents

The researchers focused on spin currents, also called magnons.

Source: Hubpage

They discovered that the spin-to-magnon conversion efficiency was the highest when the magneto-crystalline easy axis (n) was the closest to the spin polarization (μ).

In practice, it means the loss of spin was used to provide the energy required to induce a change in the magnetic status of the material. 

Source: Nature Materials

Scalable Using Current Techniques

This method adopts a simple device structure that is compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing processes.

“Until now, the field of spintronics has focused only on reducing spin losses, but we have presented a new direction by using the losses as energy to induce magnetization switching,”

Dr. Dong-Soo Han – Senior researcher at KIST.

It makes it highly feasible for mass production, and it is also advantageous for miniaturization and high integration, something that can drastically slow down the adoption of more radical new designs in electronics.

Therefore, this discovery could see quick applications in memory and computing of AI semiconductors, ultra-low power memory, neuromorphic computing, and probability-based computing devices.

As these fields are already booming, this could give this technology a massive window of opportunity.

“We plan to actively develop ultra-small and low-power AI semiconductor devices, as they can serve as the basis for ultra-low-power computing technologies that are essential in the AI era.”

Dr. Dong-Soo Han – Senior researcher at KIST.

Conclusion

Spintronics had so far been limited to hard drive technology, but it is changing rapidly thanks to a better understanding of how to manipulate and use electrons’ spins.

This should create a new type of electronics, not so much more powerful, as it is common with new & smaller chips, but more energy-efficient and even easier to manufacture, both important points as energy consumption becomes increasingly a chokepoint in the deployment of AI datacenters and edge computing (like for self-driving cars or robotics).

Spintronics Companies

1. Everspin Technologies

Everspin is a branch of Freescale (now known as NXP, stock ticker NXPI) dedicated to developing MRAM memory systems. It got spun out and IPOed in 2016.

Everspin is considered the leader of MRAM technology (Magnetoresistive Random-Access Memory), inheriting Freescale’s experience of being the first to commercialize an MRAM chip in 2006.

Because MRAM is a memory that persists even in the absence of a current, it is increasingly used in sensitive use cases where critical data is too important to risk loss.

Driven by pervasive applications such as data analytics, cloud computing, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, artificial intelligence (AI), and Edge AI, including Industrial IoT, the market for persistent memory is projected to grow at a CAGR of 27.5% between 2020 and 2030

Everspin

Source: Everspin

The company estimates the market will reach a $7.4B size by 2027. The company has had no debt and positive free cash flow since 2021.

Everspin MRAM products are currently occupying a small but growing niche, serving markets where reliability is crucial, like aerospace, satellites, data recorders, patient monitoring devices, etc.

Source: Everspin

The growth of chipsets, AI, and synaptic systems might also be a long-term boost for the company.

2. NVE Corporation

Another leader of spintronics, NVE has been working on this technology since its first patent in MRAM technology in 1995. It produces spintronic sensors and isolators, mostly used in measurement and sensor systems for cars, gears, medical devices, power supplies, and other industrial devices.

Source: NVE

This puts NVE in a somewhat different category than Everspin, with NVE more of an industrial company with a strong position in a niche market (magnetometer using spintronics), while Everspin is more of a memory/computing company working with and in competition with the likes of Intel, Qualcomm, Toshiba, and Samsung, who are also developing their own MRAM product.

It can make the stock more (or less) attractive depending on investors’ profiles, with NVE’s stock more likely to appeal to more conservative investors seeking a dividend yield and safety.

Studies Referenced

<sup>1. Peng, S., Zheng, X., Li, S. et al. Unconventional scaling of the orbital Hall effect. Nature Materials. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02326-3
2. Choi, WY., Ha, JH., Jung, MS. et al. Magnetization switching driven by magnonic spin dissipation. Nature Communications 16, 5859 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61073-w</sup>