2020/06/30 by Abdulqader Mahmoud, Florin Ciubotaru, Frederic Vanderveken +4 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #physics.app-ph #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/5.0019328
published as Journal of Applied Physics 128, 161101 (2020) · This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 801055 "Spin Wave Computing for Ultimately-Scaled Hybrid Low-Power Electronics" - CHIRON
arxiv created 2021/04/27 · arxiv updated 2021/04/28
This paper provides a tutorial overview over recent vigorous efforts to develop computing systems based on spin waves instead of charges and voltages. Spin-wave computing can be considered as a subfield of spintronics, which uses magnetic excitations for computation and memory applications. The tutorial combines backgrounds in spin-wave and device physics as well as circuit engineering to create synergies between the physics and electrical engineering communities to advance the field towards practical spin-wave circuits. After an introduction to magnetic interactions and spin-wave physics, all relevant basic aspects of spin-wave computing and individual spin-wave devices are reviewed. The focus is on spin-wave majority gates as they are the most prominently pursued device concept. Subsequently, we discuss the current status and the challenges to combine spin-wave gates and obtain circuits and ultimately computing systems, considering essential aspects such as gate interconnection, logic level restoration, input-output consistency, and fan-out achievement. We argue that spin-wave circuits need to be embedded in conventional CMOS circuits to obtain complete functional hybrid computing systems. The state of the art of benchmarking such hybrid spin-wave--CMOS systems is reviewed and the current challenges to realize such systems are discussed. The benchmark indicates that hybrid spin-wave--CMOS systems promise ultralow-power operation and may ultimately outperform conventional CMOS circuits in terms of the power-delay-area product. Current challenges to achieve this goal include low-power signal restoration in spin-wave circuits as well as efficient spin-wave transducers.