Functional integration between semiconductors and ferromagnets was demonstrated with the spin-valve transistor. A ferromagnetic multilayer was sandwiched between two device-quality silicon substrates by means of vacuum bonding. The emitter Schottky barrier injected hot electrons into the spin-valve base. The collector Schottky barrier accepts only ballistic electrons, which makes the collector current very sensitive to magnetic fields. Room temperature operation was accomplished by preparing Si-Pt-Co-Cu-Co-Si devices. The vacuum bonding technique allows the realization of many ideas for vertical transport devices and forms a permanent link that is useful in demanding adhesion applications.Ten years after its discovery (1), giant magnetoresistance (GMR) or, designated more appropriately, the spin-valve effect, has already shown its strength in applications such as read heads and magnetic random access memories (MRAMs). Driven by such lowfield applications, a search for higher sensitivities is continuing. In the spin-valve effect, majority carrier electrons with long mean free paths can travel with low resistance through a multilayer when a magnetic field aligns magnetizations of adjacent magnetic layers. In ordinary four-point resistance measurements with the current in plane (CIP), channeling, shunting, and diffusive surface scattering diminish and complicate the effect. Experiments with currents perpendicular to the planes (CPP) are very useful for fundamental studies of the electron transport process (2), yet application of the larger effect to sensors is cumbersome because of the very low resistances involved. We introduced the solidstate spin-valve transistor (SVT) structure as a spectroscopic tool to investigate transport properties of the CPP spin-valve effect and found a large, perpendicular, hot-electron spin-valve effect (3). In addition, we proposed to employ nonmagnetic and ferromagnetic tunnel barriers, of which experimental results were reported later (4). Such experiments had to be conducted at 77 K to decrease the collector leakage current with respect to the hot-electron current. Room-temperature (RT) operation requires a large emitter current density, reduction of the collector barrier area, increase of the collector barrier height, and enhancement of the base transport factor. In order to obtain sufficiently large injection current densities, a device-quality semiconductor layer would need to be grown on top of the metallic base. In practice, such layers grow poorly, so we instead turned to bonding the base between two crystalline substrates in air. This provided spontaneous adhesion based on van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonds between adsorbed water molecules. This bond was not strong enough, however, to allow lithographic processing. Our development of vacuum metal bonding during sputtering provided a superior bond and hot-electron transport in a nonmagnetic Si-Au-Ge metal base transistor (5). We have used this technique to prepare SVTs operating at RT. Because the RT operation now also p...