Devices based on Spintronics have the potential to be extremely quick and power-efficient. In a magnetic field, spin is bistable and polarised (parallel or anti-parallel, which can represent the two logic states zero and one). Simply changing spin is all that is necessary to change between them, not physically moving the electrons. Electronic devices based on charge, however, have the fundamental flaw that charge is a scalar quantity with only magnitude.
Thus, the only method to move from a value of zero to one is to alter the size of the charge, which always denotes current flow I and the corresponding dissipation I2R, where R is a resistance. Therefore, charged-based devices are inherently dissipative. The spin equivalent of single electron (charge) logic is single spin logic (SSL). In contrast to the so-called spin transistor, which uses spin only to facilitate switching, a "real" spintronics device encodes binary information as spin.
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