Spintronics: recent progress and tomorrow's challenges

This article reviews the recent advances of epitaxial ferromagnetic thin films and heterostructures as well as devices towards semiconductor-based spin-electronics or often called spintronics. We review the developments of III-V based ferromagnetic thin films and heterostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy, with focus on the Mn-delta-doped GaAs/p-AlGaAs heterostructures with high ferromagnetic transition temperature, and control of the spin-dependent properties. As a new direction in spintronics research, we present our recent study on a new silicon-based spin device, spin metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (spin MOSFET), and novel reconfigurable or reprogrammable logic gates using spin MOSFETs, which are compatible with the current CMOS technology and promising for reconfigurable computing. Crown Copyright (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.