2023/01/26 by Nicholas Zogbi, Zogbi, Nicholas, Samuel Liu +11
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Cellular Automata and Applications #Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn) #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic properties of thin films #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.11382
openalex publication_date 2023/01/26 · openalex created_date 2023/01/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The domain wall-magnetic tunnel junction (DW-MTJ) is a versatile device that can simultaneously store data and perform computations. These three-terminal devices are promising for digital logic due to their nonvolatility, low-energy operation, and radiation hardness. Here, we augment the DW-MTJ logic gate with voltage controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) to improve the reliability of logical concatenation in the presence of realistic process variations. VCMA creates potential wells that allow for reliable and repeatable localization of domain walls. The DW-MTJ logic gate supports different fanouts, allowing for multiple inputs and outputs for a single device without affecting area. We simulate a systolic array of DW-MTJ Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) units with 4-bit and 8-bit precision, which uses the nonvolatility of DW-MTJ logic gates to enable fine-grained pipelining and high parallelism. The DW-MTJ systolic array provides comparable throughput and efficiency to state-of-the-art CMOS systolic arrays while being radiation-hard. These results improve the feasibility of using domain wall-based processors, especially for extreme-environment applications such as space.