The PEPR-SPIN project involving more than 40 laboratories, including SPINTEC at IRIG, SPEC and CEA-LETI, led by CNRS and CEA with 3 partner universities (University of Grenoble Alpes, University of Paris-Saclay and University of Lorraine) has been selected and will be financed through the PEPR program to the amount of 38.13 million euros. This broad initiative aims to stimulate the pioneering French community of spintronics (SPINTEC, UMR CNRS-Thales, Institut Jean Lamour (IJL) ...), internationally renowned, having made major and fundamental advances in this field in full development. Indeed, it has built a flourishing ecosystem, which has given rise to numerous start-ups that have built on various advances in spintronics, from materials engineering to advanced instrumentation.

Projections show that by 2030, the "digital world" will be responsible for 20 to 30% of the world's electricity consumption! The necessary change of paradigm requires us to review our priorities in order to aim for real conceptual breakthroughs, and to position frugality as an essential performance criterion to be achieved, in the same way as computing power, speed, miniaturization or cost... This is where spintronics, which is intrinsically "richer" than traditional electronics that only considers the electron's charge and not its spin to create new functionalities, appears to be an essential solution. After having "revolutionized" the field of data storage and sensors, this field now offers multiple perspectives for the development of new devices that are both high-performance and energy-efficient, but also reconfigurable. Hybrid spintronic-CMOS systems and spintronic sensors are already opening up new opportunities in strategic areas such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, the cloud and digital greening. A second virtuous cycle is currently opening up in spintronics with the emergence of promising innovations resulting from new scientific breakthroughs. These will retain the unique characteristics of spintronics in terms of energy efficiency, non-volatility, radiation resistance and integrability while offering new functionalities at the interfaces with other fields of physics and engineering.

The SPIN program - Spintronic Innovations for a frugal, agile and sustainable digital economy - aims to support this new cycle of innovations through emerging themes in spin-orbitronics, magnonics and multifunctional materials. In the context of a return to the control of technological dependence called for by France and the EU, spintronics has the capacity to generate intellectual property and to support industrial renewal in many areas of major societal interest. This emerging field offers entirely new perspectives in the fields of computing, IoT, telecommunications, and reprogrammable logic, potentially responding to strong issues of sovereignty in information technology, security, energy, and health, as well as markets such as defense, nuclear, and aerospace thanks to the insensitivity of spintronic devices to ionizing radiation. Pioneers in this field, French teams have achieved major fundamental advances, which have been made possible by a rich and internationally recognized ecosystem. This program aims to support flagship collaborative projects and specific open calls for projects, to strengthen existing spintronics platforms, to attract talent through the funding of chairs, to promote European synergies, and to expand the training component to prepare for tomorrow's jobs in spintronics and related technologies.

SPINTEC will have a key role in the project, by participating namely in the overall coordination of the programme (Lucian Prejbeanu is program co-director together with Vincent Cros from CNRS-Thales lab), in the main targeted projects (beyond CMOS, THz spintronics, RF oscillators for IoT and artificial intelligence applications, smart sensing), in the transverse projects on materials, advanced instrumentation and theory.