Magnetic Cellular Automata Wire Architectures

Magnetic cellular automata (MCA) is an unconventional approach to implement Boolean logic machines. Not only it has been able to prototypically demonstrate successful operation of logical gates at room temperature, but has also realized all the key components necessary to implement any Boolean function. This moves the viability of the technology ahead of other implementations of CA and solicits researchers to examine the various aspects of MCA. Here, we investigate a critical facet of the MCA system, the interconnecting wire. We present this research further reducing the size of the single-domain nanomagnet, approximately 100 × 50 × 30 nm
³
and physically implement two types of MCA wire architectures: ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic. We provided external magnetic fields to the systems and investigated the architectures ability to mitigate frustrations. By providing fields in the in-plane easy axis, in-plane hard axis, out of plane hard axis, and a spinning field, we have experimentally concluded that for conventional data propagation between logical networks, ferromagnetic wires provide extremely stable operation. The high order of coupling found under various directions of saturating magnetic fields demonstrates the flexible clocking nature of ferromagnetic wires and inches the technology closer to implementing complex circuitry.