Agreed, it's an unfortunate namespace collision. Spintronics is a really cool area of physics, with decades of research. Electrons have spin. Although 'classic

Agreed, it's an unfortunate namespace collision. Spintronics is a really cool area of physics, with decades of research. Electrons have spin. Although 'classical semiconductors' exploit the electron's spin via the Fermi-Dirac distribution in transistors, the actual sign / direction of the 'spin' is ignored in everyday electronics. Making use of this available spin degree-of-freedom opens up a whole wealth of new possibilities. Spintronics has already revolutionized certain industries (eg, GMR in magnetic hard drives), and there are further open areas of research (eg, spin as qubit basis states in quantum computers).