Nov 2023
Abstract
Almost two decades ago, the semiconductor industry changed its roadmap in technology development: Processor clock speeds, determined to increase year after year for decades, remained constant, and performance improvements since then are due to shrinking sizes and multicore architectures. These impediments led to an increased attention to alternative device schemes. Many have been proposed, among them also various nanomagnetic and spin-based concepts. In this seminar, I will discuss a few of them. I will argue why some of them made into a product and why others will never make it. And I will try to outline where recently discussed physical phenomena such as the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in ultrathin ferromagnetic films might help to improve device performance and why magnetic domain walls could be of use to build neuromorphic computing architectures.
Bio
Rolf Allenspach is with the Science of Quantum and Information Technology Department at IBM Research – Zurich, Rüschlikon (Switzerland), and is responsible for projects in the area of nanomagnetism and spintronics.
He received his PhD from the ETH in Zurich for work in the field of spin-polarized electron spectroscopy in 1986. When joining IBM as a Research Staff Member, he started a project on the investigation of ferromagnetic materials for possible applications in magnetic storage. He did his habilitation at the ETH in 1994 and enjoyed lecturing there for the past 30 years on topics in condensed-matter physics. He received the Kern Prize and Silver Medal of the ETH in 1982 for his diploma thesis, was awarded Wohlfarth lecturer of the Institute of Physics (London) in 1992, was named Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009, was elected to the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences (SATW) in 2012 and received several technical awards from IBM.
He is the author of many articles (some of them are 30 years old but still remembered!), wrote 5 book chapters, edited the first Swiss Nanotechnology Report and holds about 20 patents, mainly on magnetic devices and nanotechnology in general.