While Si-based CMOS has still some room for improvement, it is known that this will not continue longer than the next decade and that the development of new materials and new paradigms is becoming increasingly important. Mainly, future devices for information processing will require a further material downscaling, accompanied by a considerable reduction of power consumption (and associated costs) which is not in the range of any present Si technology. Hence, during the past decade, a tremendous research activity has been focused on providing new opportunities for beyond CMOS applications.

New breakthroughs are hence now mainly expected to arise at the frontier and in synergy between different fields.  At the confluence of surface science, magnetism, chemistry and spin transport physics fields, the new field of organic and molecular spintronics may open new ways for the fabrication of tunable memory devices and sensors, but also for the design of novel elements for classical or quantum bits and logics for beyond CMOS technology at a potentially low cost. Hybrid organic/inorganic spintronics combines naturally down-scalable, flexible and low cost organic materials, with low energy consumption information processing via spintronics effects.

Thanks to the spin-dependent hybridization at ferromagnet/molecules interfaces both magnetism and spin polarization can be controlled. Hence these multifunctional and tunable hybrid interfaces can lead to radically new and custom-engineered properties suitable for electrical ICT applications and represent a powerful tool for the spintronics devices tailoring. It could also bring new opportunities in organic electronics devices such as unlocking the efficiency limit of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).