2018/07/27 by Noel D'Souza, Noel D’Souza, Ayan Biswas +8 · 2 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Energy (signal processing) #Ferroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices #Field (mathematics) #Magnetic properties of thin films #Magnetization #Magnetization dynamics #Multiferroics #Multiferroics and related materials #Nanomagnet #Transistor #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1361-6528/aad65d
published as Nanotechnology, vol 44, 442001 (2018) · This is a commissioned topical review article published in Nanotechnology
openalex publication_date 2018/07/27 · openalex created_date 2018/08/03 · arxiv created 2018/09/23 · arxiv updated 2020/05/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The need for increasingly powerful computing hardware has spawned many ideas stipulating, primarily, the replacement of traditional transistors with alternate 'switches' that dissipate miniscule amounts of energy when they switch and provide additional functionality that are beneficial for information processing. An interesting idea that has emerged recently is the notion of using two-phase (piezoelectric/magnetostrictive) multiferroic nanomagnets with bistable (or multi-stable) magnetization states to encode digital information (bits), and switching the magnetization between these states with small voltages (that strain the nanomagnets) to carry out digital information processing. The switching delay is ∼1 ns and the energy dissipated in the switching operation can be few to tens of aJ, which is comparable to, or smaller than, the energy dissipated in switching a modern-day transistor. Unlike a transistor, a nanomagnet is 'non-volatile', so a nanomagnetic processing unit can store the result of a computation locally without refresh cycles, thereby allowing it to double as both logic and memory. These dual-role elements promise new, robust, energy-efficient, high-speed computing and signal processing architectures (usually non-Boolean and often non-von-Neumann) that can be more powerful, architecturally superior (fewer circuit elements needed to implement a given function) and sometimes faster than their traditional transistor-based counterparts. This topical review covers the important advances in computing and information processing with nanomagnets, with emphasis on strain-switched multiferroic nanomagnets acting as non-volatile and energy-efficient switches-a field known as 'straintronics'. It also outlines key challenges in straintronics.