School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and NSF Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA.
Nat Nanotechnol. 2010 Apr;5(4):266-70. doi: 10.1038/nnano.2010.31. Epub 2010 Feb 28.
The possible use of spin rather than charge as a state variable in devices for processing and storing information has been widely discussed, because it could allow low-power operation and might also have applications in quantum computing. However, spin-based experiments and proposals for logic applications typically use spin only as an internal variable, the terminal quantities for each individual logic gate still being charge-based. This requires repeated spin-to-charge conversion, using extra hardware that offsets any possible advantage. Here we propose a spintronic device that uses spin at every stage of its operation. Input and output information are represented by the magnetization of nanomagnets that communicate through spin-coherent channels. Based on simulations with an experimentally benchmarked model, we argue that the device is both feasible and shows the five essential characteristics for logic applications: concatenability, nonlinearity, feedback elimination, gain and a complete set of Boolean operations.
自旋而非电荷作为设备中信息处理和存储的状态变量的可能用途已经被广泛讨论，因为它可以实现低功耗操作，并且在量子计算中也可能有应用。然而，基于自旋的实验和用于逻辑应用的方案通常仅将自旋用作内部变量，每个单独逻辑门的终端量仍然是基于电荷的。这需要使用额外的硬件进行多次自旋到电荷的转换，从而抵消任何可能的优势。在这里，我们提出了一种自旋电子学器件，它在其操作的每个阶段都使用自旋。输入和输出信息由通过自旋相干通道进行通信的纳米磁铁的磁化表示。基于经过实验基准测试的模型的模拟，我们认为该器件不仅可行，而且还具有逻辑应用的五个基本特征：级联、非线性、反馈消除、增益和一套完整的布尔操作。
