A radiation hardened hybrid spintronic/CMOS nonvolatile unit using magnetic tunnel junctions

Abstract

Conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based devices are approaching their physical limits to continue the Moore's law. Spintronic devices that exploit the intrinsic spin freedom of the electron in addition to its fundamental electrical charge show great potential in nanoscale technology nodes. In particular, hybrid spintronic/CMOS technology based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) has been considered as a very promising approach thanks to the high speed, low power, good scalability and full compatibility of MTJs with CMOS technology. It is also considered as a potential technology for high-reliability electronics due to the intrinsic hardness to the radiation effect of the MTJs. However, hybrid spintronic/CMOS circuits are still vulnerable to the radiation effect due to their CMOS peripheral circuits (e.g. write/read circuits) during the access operations. In this paper, we propose a radiation hardened hybrid spintronic/CMOS nonvolatile unit to address this issue effectively. By using a physics-based pMTJ compact model and a 40 nm CMOS design kit, hybrid simulations are performed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed unit. The simulation results show that the proposed unit is quite robust against radiation effects with less overhead in terms of hardware area and power consumption compared with the previous works.