Definition: spintronics

(SPIN elecTRONICS) Using the spin of an electron to represent binary data (0 or 1). Spintronics techniques are capable of much higher speed while requiring less power than the conventional method of using electron charges to represent data. Expected to become widely used in sensors and non-volatile memories, the first use of spintronics was in the late 1980s with the development of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) read heads for disk drives. See magnetoresistance and MRAM.