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Interview | Electronics | Fundamental Research

Bernard Dieny - Developing multifunctional magneto electronic integrated circuits particularly suitable for the Internet of Objects (Magical)

Bernard Dieny recounts the major highlights of his professional career. From the development of hard drive read heads in the United States to spintronics in Grenoble, his path has been paved with success. He leads an ERC research project that aims to develop multifunctional magneto electronic integrated circuits particularly suitable for the Internet of objects.

I developed a taste for fundamental research geared towards practical applications very early on. After a fundamental-research-focused thesis at Institut NEEL (Grenoble), I headed to the IBM research center in Almaden, California. That was in 1989, just after the discovery by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg of giant magnetoresistance (GMR). This immediately generated a lot of interest for hard drive read heads among industry players. At IBM, I was asked to find materials displaying a GMR effect with magnetic fields a thousand times weaker than those used by the original discoverers. Within several months, I discovered what are known as spin valves, and just eight years later, developments led to a commercialized product that included those materials. My 18-month stay at IBM was a revelation for me.

Once I arrived at CEA, I focused my research on applications for nanomagnetism and spintronics—specifically in the field of magnetic sensors—by forging ties with LETI. This framework gave rise to a structure linking fundamental research and industrial applications, and combining microelectronics with magnetism. And that's how the Spintec laboratory came to be, in 2002, uniting fundamental research teams from CEA, Institut NEEL, and CNRS in Strasbourg, with practical applications as their watchword.

Several years later, Spintec's original developments, like MRAMs (Magnetic Random Access Memory) with heat-assisted recording or CMOS hybrid microelectronic circuits—magnetic tunnel junctions, intended for low-energy electronics—led to the creation of two startups, Crocus Technology and eVaderis.

In 2010, a major discovery at Spintec—the "spin-orbit torque" (SOT)—gave rise to a very promising field in spintronics. As though in honor of these achievements, Samsung revealed an MRAM demonstrator embedded into a display controller this summer in Zurich. This is excellent news for our components: a whole new field of application is opening up.

We have another promising world "record" to our name, this time in the health sector. We demonstrated a concept for cancer treatment based on selective mechanical vibrations applied to tumor cells via magnetic nanoparticles, which disrupt ionic exchanges across their membranes and trigger apoptosis: programed cell death. Proof of concept was carried out on cell cultures from kidney tumors and melanoma, and must be confirmed with in vivo testing.

Bernard Dieny, recipient of three ERC grants, is Scientific Director of Spintec (Institute for nanosciences and cryogenics, CEA/Grenoble Alpes Universty, Grenoble). His work led to the creation of Crocus Technology in 2004. 

Bernard Dieny is leading a research project to develop multifunctional magneto electronic integrated circuits particularly suitable for the Internet of objects. This project, named Magical, was selected in 2015 by the European Research Council.
Between 2010 and 2015, Bernard Dieny received a first ERC grant for a project called Hymagine, dedicated to the development of magnetic components and systems for the development of reprogrammable electronics, with non-volatile memory with low energy consumption.
This project, completed by an ERC-Proof of Concept contract, led to the creation of the Evaderis start-up of circuit design in hybrid CMOS / magnetic technology.



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