An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A new area of science and technology which exploits the intrinsic → spin of electrons and its associated → magnetic moment, in addition to its fundamental electronic charge, in solid-state devices. In brief, spin-based electronics. For example, information could be transported or stored through the spin-up or spin-down states of electrons. Spintronics techniques are capable of much higher speed while requiring less power than the conventional method of using electron charges to represent data. The first use of spintronics was in the late 1980s with the development of → giant magnetoresistance (GMR) read heads for disk drives

See also: Short for → spin + → electronics.