High-Performance Spintronic Nonvolatile Ternary Flip-Flop and Universal Shift Register

Multiple-valued logic (MVL) shows considerable advantages over binary logic in certain applications because of the increased informational content of its signals, and hence reduction in interconnects. Flip-flops (FFs) are the basic elements of many systems and are widely used in microprocessors due to their high performance. This article presents two spintronic ternary retention FFs, and a nonvolatile universal ternary shift register (NUTSR) based on gate-all-around carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (GAA-CNTFETs) and nonvolatile magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). In the proposed input-aware ternary retention FF circuit, power consumption is significantly reduced by adding a magnitude comparator (MC) circuit and preventing duplicate data transfer to MTJs. Simulation results indicate that our design offers at least 22%, 40%, and 15% reductions in power consumption, backup time, and restore energy, respectively. Moreover, it eliminates the risk of data loss in the event of a sudden power outage.