Electric-field control of magnetism
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Introduction Microelectronics components and systems form an everincreasing backbone of our society. Laptops, PCs, smart phones and various forms of computing devices are indispensable for our day-to-day life. Computing devices have pervaded many parts of our daily life, for example, through a host of consumer electronics systems, providing sensing, actuation, communication, processing, and storage of information. All of these are built upon a global market that is approximately USD$420B/ year and growing at a steady pace of 10–15% annually.1,2 Many of these innovations started as materials research ideas. All of these will likely fade into the background by the emergence of a few global phenomena. The first is the notion of “The Internet of Things (IoT),” which is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity that direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems. This will result in efficiency improvements, economic benefits, and reduced human exertion,3 as illustrated in Figure 1. It is not inconceivable that every modern building could be outfitted with millions of sensors and actuators that can dynamically optimize the energy consumption dynamics of that building. Similarly, a modern automobile has a large number of sensing and communicating components embedded.
The second major phenomenon is the field of machine learning (ML)/artificial intelligence (AI) that is taking the technology world by storm. It uses a large amount of data, a significant amount of statistical data analytics, and provides the computing system with the ability to “learn” and do things better as it learns, much like human beings. While there are several scientific disciplines that come into play, of relevance to us is the fact that microelectronic components are critical underpinnings for this field. While still in their infancy, it is not inconceivable that driverless cars, for example, will be a routine aspect of our life 20 years from now. How do these relate to microelectronics and, more importantly, new materials? To put this into perspective, we now need to look at the fundamental techno-economic framework that has been driving the microelectronics field for more than five decades. This is the well-known “Moore’s Law,” which underpins the field of microelectronics through the scaling of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based transistors. Broadly, it states that the critical dimensions of the CMOS transistor shrink by 50% every 18–24 months. At its inception, CMOS transistors were macroscopic with critical gate dimensions well over 1 µm. In 1974, a path to shrinking them was proposed (while keeping power density constant),4–6 and this was followed for the next 30+ years. Today, Dennard scaling5 is no longer possible and the critical dimensions are
R. Ramesh, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley; and Materials Sciences Divisi
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