A giant magnetoimpedance effect based nonvolatile Boolean logic gate

The biphase magnetic heterostructure (Ni/Fe20Ni45Co25Si2B8/micro-planar coil/Fe20Ni45Co25Si2B8/micro-planar coil/Fe20Ni45Co25Si2B8/Ni) bonded with a pair of thin magnets shows improved asymmetric and hysteretic giant magnetoimpedance (GMI) effect with respect to external dc magnetic field. This is attributed to the modification of soft amorphous magnetic alloy's (Fe20Ni45Co25Si2B8) permeability by the hysteretic magnetostrictive stress from the neighboring magnetostrictive Ni layer besides the magnetostatic coupling. More importantly, the nonvolatile logic gates such as NOR and NAND can be implemented with either a single GMI laminate or arrays. On one hand, after applying two sequent magnetic field pulses as the logic inputs to a single proposed laminate, the nonvolatile output voltages are positive high (logic 1) or positive low (logic 0) depending on the signs and magnitudes of pulses. On the other hand, after applying the magnetic field pulses parallel to the GMI laminates arrays, different logic functions can be programmed and realized at run-time. The integration of memory and logic functions enables the proposed GMI laminate as a possible candidate for future computing system beyond von Neumann architecture.