Voltage-Gated Spin-Hall Effect Based Magnetic Non-Volatile Flip-Flop for High Speed, Low Power and Compact Cell Area

2020 
In this paper, we present a novel magnetic nonvolatile flip-flop (MNV-FF) for fast and low-power backup operation with a compact cell area. It employs perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (p-MTJs) as its non-volatile data backup storage units and exploits the voltage-gated spin-hall effect (VGSHE) for data backup operation. Benefitting from the assistance of the voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) effect, the critical write current for 1-ns backup operation can be reduced to 3 μA or even lower, thus resulting in high speed and low power consumption. Moreover, such small write current allows to be driven by the cross-coupled inverters in the master latch, instead of a dedicated write driver, leading to a low cell area overhead. Additionally, by using an antiferromagnetic (AFM) metal that can provide both an exchange bias and the SHE instead of the heavy metal, no external magnetic field is required, making it suitable for practical applications. Our simulation results show that our proposed VGSHE-based MNV-FF can achieve 58.2× less backup energy, 1.85× less backup delay and 1.625× less cell area overhead than the previous SHE-based MNV-FF.
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