Multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials for spintronics

Purely voltage controlled multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials promise to fulfil the requirements of minimal heat dissipation in three-dimensional spintronic architectures. Actually, most promising concepts aim at electrically controlling the giant or tunneling magnetoresistance of magnetic multilayer stacks. They are based either on magnetoelectric and/or multiferroic tunnel barriers or on exchange-coupled magnetoelectric pinning layers. The physical principles and the state of the art of these concepts will be discussed for devices involving La0.1Bi0.9MnO3 tunneling barriers and Cr2O3 pinning layers, respectively.