CMOS/Magnetic Hybrid Architectures

Abstract

The general purpose of spin-electronics is to take advantage of the spin of the electrons in addition to their electrical charge to conceive innovative electronic components. These components combine magnetic materials which are used as spin-polarizer or analyzer together with semiconductors or insulators. SPINTEC Laboratory works on the development of these components and their integration in innovative hybrid CMOS/magnetic architectures. We study in particular the use of Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJ) for the design of Magnetic Random Access Memories (MRAM), Magnetic FPGA (MFPGA) and non-reprogrammable logical devices (transceivers, adders, decoders). The design of these hybrid architectures requires to develop electrical equivalent models of the magnetic elementary components (magnetic tunnel junctions, spin-valves, Hall crosses) compatible with SPICE-like simulators. Complete simulations of the hybrid devices are performed before experimental realization and testing.

Failure and reliability analysis of STT-MRAM

“…Through Spin transfer torque mechanism, a low bidirectional current, I WR higher than the threshold current I C0 can switch the MTJ between two states [1]. logic applications [4][5][6][7]. However, as the switching current is inversely proportional to the switching duration, a high current density J c is normally required to achieve this purpose (see Fig.…”

“…These advantageous features attract much attention of R&D, a number of pre-industrial prototypes have been demonstrated since 2005 [3,4] and one expects to commercialize it in the next few years. Its non-volatility, infinite endure and logic compatibility also allow conceiving the STT-MRAM based logic circuit [5][6][7], such as Magnetic Look-Up Table (MLUT), Magnetic Flip-Flop (MFF), Magnetic Full-Adder (MFA) and Magnetic shift register etc. They expose a great potential on low power dissipation, small die area, fast speed and is considered to have ability to replace the other types of current logic circuits.…”

Magnetic Random Access Memory based non-volatile asynchronous Muller cell for ultra-low power autonomous applications

“…A. Logic-in-memory concept Nowadays, the NVM technologies can be an alternative not only for the pure memory applications, such as cache, main, or storage memories, but also for the embedded or localized memory, like registers or flip-flops. [7][8][9][10][11] Moreover, we can rethink the memory principle, distance from the fundamental attribute of any modern computing device Von Neumann architecture ( Fig. 1(a)), and use NVM in a more advanced architecture, such as Logic-in-Memory ( Fig.…”

Emerging hybrid logic circuits based on non-volatile magnetic memories

“…Magnetic Full-Adder (MFA) .etc [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. In this introduction article of the special invited session "Magnetic RAM based computing"; we describe an overview of the hybrid magnetic logic circuits and discuss their potential applications.…”

“…Flash memory, FRAM, PCRAM and RRAM are characterized by limited endurance <10 12 [2]. This makes MRAM really good candidate for many applications such as non-volatile configuration FPGA (NVFPGA), NV Flip-Flop (NVFF) and NV Full-Adder for ultra low power CPU [18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”