Abstract: Using electron spins to manipulate magnetic moment in magnetic devices at nanometer scale presents opportunities to integrate large scale nonvolatile logic and memory monolithically on top of CMOS circuits. Successes in this direction could enable on-chip access of sub-terabyte level of data storage and could bring revolutionary change in data-centric computing.  

For spin-based logic device design, fan-out capability presents a realistic challenge due to the fact that magnetoresistive devices have no intrinsic gain, especially the current gain which is required to propel the next stage logic change. mLogic technology employees the idea of power clock to create effective gain that drives the logic states of successive stages. This circuit innovation combining with spin Hall effect can create mCell-based logic circuits capable of carrying out any logic operation and can be used to build a general purpose microprocessor with inherent persistency at every logic node/state.

In this talk, we will present experimental demonstrations of individual spin Hall based logic switch in terms of fabrication process and electronic testing. Combined micromagnetic study will also be presented. In this talk, we will also present an innovative idea of a metal-based 3D nonvolatile memory, referred to as the z-Link memory, which could be monolithically fabricated on top of CMOS chip to bring mass storage directly above semiconductor microprocessor. Micromagnetic modeling investigation of device level operation will be discussed.  

Bio: Jian-Gang (Jimmy) Zhu is the ABB Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He severs as the director of the Data Storage Systems Center. Zhu received his Ph.D. in Physics from University of California at San Diego in 1989.