As the main enabling technology of the semiconductor industry, the fabrication of silicon chips is reaching the limits of efficiency and for growth.
Electrical engineers at the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the University of Notre Dame have devised a new type of building block for digital integrated circuits and are exploring magnetic computing as an alternative, reports ScienceDaily.
Their experiments show that future computer chips could be based on three-dimensional arrangements of nanometer-scale magnets instead of transistors. By bringing together the fields of nanomagnets, they are coupled into one force. With a 3D stack of nanomagnets, the researchers created a logic gate, which could serve as a programmable switch in a digital circuit.
Magnetic circuits offer several advantages. Extremely low energy consumption is one of their most promising characteristics.
The most basic building blocks, the individual nanomagnets, are comparable in size to individual transistors. However, it takes fewer magnets than transistors to get the job done.
While transistors require contacts and wiring, nanomagnets operate purely with coupling fields.
"The potential to break out of the 2D design space with stacks of 3D devices makes nanomagnetic logic competitive," said TUM doctoral candidate Irina Eichwald, also the lead researcher. "The 3D majority gate demonstrates that magnetic computing can be exploited in all three dimensions, in order to realize sequentially stacked magnetic circuits promising better scalability and improved packing density."
"It is a big challenge to compete with silicon circuits," said Markus Becherer, leader of the TUM research group within the Institute for Technical Electronics. "However, there might be applications where the non-volatile, ultralow-power operation and high integration density offered by 3D nanomagnetic circuits give them an edge."
The research was presented at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington DC.
