Fast and robust magnetic quantum cellular automata interconnect architectures

Abstract

Magnetic quantum cellular automata (magnetic QCA or MQCA) circuits, although are very promising, have fundamental and practical limitations. The operation frequency and reliability of MQCA circuits are not encouraging due to slow and robustless MQCA interconnect architectures. Three-phase pipelined clocking signals designed for MQCA bistable zone cells are first presented, and then the authors propose using this clocking integrating mixed magnetic anisotropy to eliminate slow and non-sequential switching in the MQCA interconnects. Micromagnetic simulations on a corner are performed to corroborate the proposed method. More results show that an interconnect comprising NiFe nanomagnets requires lower energy overhead and shows higher operation frequency. Furthermore, the authors study the kink energy of different coupling styles and find that frustration of turning antiferromagnetic state fails MQCA global clocking corner architecture. In general, the proposed interconnect scheme requires no additional magnetic helper blocks and promises fast and robust operation, which is promising in building future nanoscale ultra-high reliability information computation circuits and may inspire wide applications of MQCA devices.