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The Board of Editors of Scientific American has cited Assistant Professor Hanan Dery as one of its top 50 technical leaders of 2007. Dery is being honored specifically as a research leader for developing the spintronics logic gate.Known as the "Scientific American 50," the award is in its sixth year and honors 50 individuals, teams, companies, business, or policymakers who have demonstrated outstanding technological leadership. Winners during the past several years have included Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google (sharing the distinction of 2005 Business Leader of the Year), research philanthropist Fred Kavli (2005 Policy Leader of the Year), renowned stem cell researcher Douglas A. Melton, Professor of the National Sciences at Harvard (2004 Policy Leader of the Year), and Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist Roderick MacKinnon, Professor of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics of Rockefeller University (2003 Research Leader of the Year). The complete list of winners for the Scientific American 50 appears in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American.

Previously, Dr. Dery was a Postdoctoral Associate in Lu Sham's group in the Department of Physics, University of California San Diego (UCSD). During this time, he worked on spintronics, seeking ways to integrate information based on electron spin into semiconductors. Dery earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 2004. His PhD research was in optoelectronic nanostructure devices with a focus on nonlinear gain processes and carrier dynamic properties. In the Fall 2007 semester, Dery taught graduate course ECE-492, Special topic in spin-based electronics: Theory, Devices & Applications; and in Spring 2008, he will teach ECE-200, Computer Architecture.

More on Spintronics

A semiconductor computer circuit based on the spin of electrons? For those of us who came of age back when electronics were based on electric current producing binary ones and zeroes, the notion of using electron spin for semiconductors is beyond visionary. Yet this is a field of emerging strength in electronics research.

This type of device is expected to be highly scalable and have much greater computational capacity than silicon circuits in use today. Basically, a spintronic device encodes information using the charge of the electrons, as well as their magnetic, or spin, states. A key to successful spintronics is to overcome the weakness of the magnetic signal, something that Dery and his associates have been able to do.

Dery's spintronic circuit (Nature, June 2006) is composed of logic gates, each of which consists of a semiconductor layer topped by five magnetic contacts (see below). The magnetic state of each contact is determined by electron spin, between four of the magnetic contacts and the semiconductor, and then the fifth magnetic contact reads the result. Working with Dery were his collaborators at UCSD: Lu J. Sham, P. Dalal, and L. Cywinski.

"Spin-based electronic devices allow the construction of reprogrammable circuits without hindering performance," says Assistant Professor Dery. In addition, the integration of spintronics into a semiconductor reduces the size of circuits and speeds up computations.

-Lois Gresh