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Researchers Analyze the Future of Transistor-Less Magnonic Logic Circuits

By PhysOrg.com
June 28, 2010
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The emerging field of magnonics is attracting researchers because of its possible role in the development of transistorless logic circuits, and researchers are investigating how to use spin wave phenomena to make logic circuits.

Unlike CMOS logic circuits, which use electric current to store and transfer data, magnonic logic circuits use spin waves propagating in magnetic waveguides. By avoiding electric currents, magnonic logic circuits have the potential to enable more efficient data transfer and enhanced logic functionality, including parallel data processing.

This figure compares CMOS logic and magnonic logicin terms of throughput as a function of the minimum feature size, which is the gate length for CMOS and the wavelength for a spin wave circuit. The throughput of demonstrated spin logic is prototypes is currently  far below current CMOS technology. Credit: Alexander Khitun, et al / UCLA

Magnonic logic circuits can encode a bit of information through either the amplitude or the phase of the spin wave. Although the amplitude-encoding approach has benefits, including low power consumption due to the low energy of the spin wave signal, the phase-encoding approach is more promising, according to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers.

"The greatest potential advantage of magnonic logic circuits is the ability to process information in parallel on different frequencies, which is not possible for CMOS-based logic," says UCLA researcher Alexander Khitun.

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