ABSTRACT
The fast growing ‹eld of microelectronics and information processing has been based on fabricating devices out of conductors and doped semiconductors, where the charge of the electron is exploited. Generation to generation improvements in the performance of microelectronic devices are currently accomplished by shrinking the size of the elements in the chips. However, this approach will soon hit the barrier due to the issues related to fabrication of shallow channel junctions and heat management [1]. Similarly, information storage, the second vital piece of the microelectronic revolution, depends on magnetic storage devices that exploit the spin component of the electron [2,3]. With the goal of realizing spintronic devices such as spin valves, spin light-emitting diodes (LEDs), nonvolatile memory, spin transistors, and ultra-fast optical switches, a signi‹cant amount of research thrust has been focused on discovering materials suitable for these applications [4,5]. One of the ingenious ways to combine the spin and charge of the carriers in material and achieve these effects, is synthesizing a material with semiconducting as well as magnetic properties. Since conventionally used semiconductors such as Si and GaAs are diamagnetic and possess a very small g-factor (measure of the interaction strength with an applied magnetic ‹eld), there must be a way to integrate the semiconducting and magnetic properties by some other means.
