  Spintronics is aimed at active controlling and manipulating the spin degrees
of freedom in semiconductor devices. A promising way to achieve this goal is to
make use of the tunable Rashba effect that relies on the spin-orbit interaction
(SOI) in a two-dimensional (2D) electron system immersed in an
inversion-asymmetric environment. The SOI induced spin-splitting of the
2D-electron state provides a basis for many theoretically proposed spintronic
devices. However, the lack of semiconductors with large Rashba effect hinders
realization of these devices in actual practice. Here we report on a giant
Rashba-type spin splitting in 2D electron systems which reside at
tellurium-terminated surfaces of bismuth tellurohalides. Among these
semiconductors, BiTeCl stands out for its isotropic metallic surface-state band
with the Gamma-point energy lying deep inside the bulk band gap. The giant
spin-splitting of this band ensures a substantial spin asymmetry of the
inelastic mean free path of quasiparticles with different spin orientations.
