Audion Audion The Audion was an electronic detecting or amplifying vacuum tube invented by American electrical engineer Lee de Forest in 1906. It was the first triode, consisting of an evacuated glass tube containing three electrodes: a heated filament, a grid, and a plate. It is important in the history of technology because it was the first widely used electronic device which could amplify; a small electrical signal applied to the grid could control a larger current flowing from the filament to plate. The original triode Audion had more residual gas in the tube than later versions and vacuum tubes; the
Spin valve Spin valve A spin valve is a device, consisting of two or more conducting magnetic materials, whose electrical resistance can change between two values depending on the relative alignment of the magnetization in the layers. The resistance change is a result of the giant magnetoresistive effect. The magnetic layers of the device align "up" or "down" depending on an external magnetic field. In the simplest case, a spin valve consists of a non-magnetic material sandwiched between two ferromagnets, one of which is fixed (pinned) by an antiferromagnet which acts to raise its magnetic coercivity and behaves as a "hard" layer,