Book Review: Spintronics-Based Computing

If you’re a casual reader looking for a spellbinding page-turner, or a curious amateur technophile, this is not the book for you. It is filled with grammatical errors and clumsy diction, the tone is as dry as the Gobi Desert, and there is no graceful introduction beyond the excellent summary in the short Foreword by Albert Fert. After that the various authors plunge directly into advanced technical detail, leaving the non-expert to cope with a baffling assemblage of acronyms. The Editors have not attempted to ease this tension via any overlays of their own, being apparently content to simply assemble the authors’ completed manuscripts. If, on the other hand, you are a condensed matter physicist specializing in an area relevant to spintronics and would like to know what has been (or may be) done using the phenomena you study, or if you are an electrical engineer specializing in computing using spintronics devices, and would like a current reference handbook, or if you are a device manufacturer or a software engineer trying to anticipate the next few increments (or bypasses) of Moore’s Law, you may well find this a valuable resource. From my own viewpoint (that of a retired physicist reading for fun) this book is actually rather interesting. First because it outlines the roadblocks to Moore’s Law in meticulous detail and offers insight into where high performance computing is likely to go next; it seems quite probable that the terms of reference of Moore’s Law will be revised qualitatively before the industry bumps up against the hard limits imposed by quantummechanics and ohmic losses. Second, because it vividly displays the speciation of human endeavor in the pursuit of extremely profitable technologies: each new incremental improvement of performance (not to mention each new breakthrough) entails ever more specialized refinements of materials and techniques, leading to an encyclopedic terminology which can only fit into a finite space by reducing each to its own acronym. Here they are all assembled. One worries that verbs will be acronymized as well, so that entire sentences contain nothing but acronyms (as is common in “texting” already). But in this volume there are still many sentences recognizable as English, and some of them are quite enjoyable to read. Glossary of Acronyms: (⋆= “trending” in Spintronics)