NVE Corporation is a leader in the practical commercialization of spintronics, a nanotechnology that relies on electron spin rather than electron charge to acquire, store and transmit information.
The company manufactures high-performance spintronic sensors and isolators. NVE’s award-winning products offer smaller size, more precision, higher speed, and are more rugged than conventional devices. NVE parts are popular in industrial, scientific, and medical applications, as well as the emerging Industrial Internet of Things.
NVE sensors are available as analog magnetic sensors, digital magnetic switches, or Smart Sensors with embedded processing. Applications include proximity sensing, current sensing, angle sensing, and rotation sensing, NVE sensors are smaller, more sensitive, and more precise than conventional sensors such as Hall effect or AMR. NVE developed the first commercial spintronic GMR sensors in 1995.
NVE’s award-winning isolators provide unprecedented small size, high speed, low pulse width distortion, high common transient immunity, high isolation, excellent magnetic immunity, best-in-class EMC, and unlimited life with no degradation.
Isolator product lines include the industry-standard IL700 / IL200-Series, the IL4- / IL3-Series single-chip isolated RS-485/RS-422/PROFIBUS/CAN transceivers, IL46xx RS-485/RS-422 isolators with integrated DC-to-DC converters, the cost-effective IL500-Series, IL600-Series Passive-Input Isolators, and V-Series 6 kV Isolators.
NVE products are based on either giant magnetoresistance (GMR) or tunnelling magnetoresistance. (TMR). These structures produce a large change in electrical resistance depending on the electron spin orientation in a free layer.
In giant magnetoresistance (GMR) devices, resistance changes due to conduction electrons scattering at interfaces within the devices. The GMR effect is only significant if the layer thicknesses are less than the mean free path of conduction electrons, which is approximately five nanometers. Critical GMR conductor layers may be less than two nanometers, or five atomic layers, thick.
The second type of spintronic structure NVE uses is TMR, which uses tunnel barriers that are so thin that electrons can “tunnel” through a normally insulating material to cause a resistance change. Tunnel barrier thicknesses can be in the range of one to four nanometers (less than ten molecular layers).
NVE was founded in 1989. The company is located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. For their official website, please visit www.nve.com