Improving the performance of a non-volatile magnetic flip flop by exploiting the spin Hall effect

Abstract

The introduction of non-volatile elements into state-of-the art computing systems is a promising way to circumvent power dissipation and interconnection delay bottlenecks. This led us to the proposal of a non-volatile magnetic flip flop which offers high integration density as well as CMOS compatibility by not only acting as an auxiliary memory element but also carrying out the actual computation in the magnetic domain without relying on additional CMOS components. However, the required switching energy is still relatively high which results in a high current density needed for the flip flop manipulation. Here, we propose a modified device structure with a different device operation principle to benefit from the spin Hall effect in order to reduce the required switching energy without degrading other important parameters like switching speed or device reliability. Our results show that the use of the spin Hall effect is rewarded by a simultaneous reduction in switching time (×5 − ×2) and switching energy (×5 − ×1.6).