Perspectives and Challenges of Scaled Boolean Spintronic Circuits Based on Magnetic Tunnel Junction Transducers

Abstract

This paper addresses the question: Can spintronic circuits based on Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) transducers outperform their state-of-the-art CMOS counterparts? To this end, we use the EPFL combinational benchmark sets, synthesize them in 7 nm CMOS and in MTJ-based spintronic technologies, and compare the two implementation methods in terms of Energy-Delay-Product (EDP). To fully utilize the technologies potential, CMOS and spintronic implementations are built upon standard Boolean and Majority Gates, respectively. For the spintronic circuits, we assumed that domain conversion (electric/magnetic to magnetic/electric) is performed by means of MTJs and the computation is accomplished by domain wall based majority gates, and considered two EDP estimation scenarios: (i) Uniform Benchmarking, which ignores the circuit's internal structure and only includes domain transducers power and delay contributions into the calculations, and (ii) Majority-Inverter-Graph Benchmarking, which also embeds the circuit structure, the associated critical path delay and energy consumption by DW propagation. Our results indicate that for the uniform case, the spintronic route is better suited for the implementation of complex circuits with few inputs and outputs. On the other hand, when the circuit structure is also considered via majority and inverter synthesis, our analysis clearly indicates that in order to match and eventually outperform CMOS performance, MTJ efficiency has to be improved by 3-4 orders of magnitude. While it is clear that for the time being the MTJ-based-spintronic way cannot compete with CMOS, further transducer developments may tip the balance, which, when combined with information non-volatility, may make spintronic implementation for certain applications that require a large number of calculations and have a rather limited amount of interaction with the environment.