Spintronics - from materials through devices to circuits -

Spintronics is the field in which both charge and spin degrees of freedom are used to realize functions otherwise not accessible. A wide variety of research is being carried out from those that are more exploratory in nature to close to the real world applications, from novel spin based semiconductor device structures to magnetic material-semiconductor hybrid structures not only for magnetic random access memories but for nonvolatile logic applications. Here, the author gives a personal overview of recent developments and perspective; first focusing on metal-based spintronics and then on semiconductor spintronics.