Comparison of spintronics and nanoelectronics for information processing

To date, electronics uses electron charge as a state variable which is often represented as voltage or current. In this representation of state variable in today’s electronics, carriers in electronics devices work independently even to a few and single electron cases. As the scaling continues to reduce the feature size, power dissipation and variability become two major challenges among others as identified in ITRS. This paper presents the exposition that spintronics as a collective effect may be favorably used as state variables in the near future information processing beyond conventional electronics for room temperature. An example is presented to compare electronics and spintronics in terms of variability, quantum and thermal fluctuations. This example shows the benefit of scaling to smaller sizes in the case of spintronics (nanomagnetics), which will have a much reduced variability problem as compared with today’s electronics. Finally, spin wave bus is used to illustrate the potential use as a state variable for logic application. Prototype logic devices using the spin wave bus concept have been demonstrated. The requirements and benchmarks for choosing a state variable are also discussed in terms of its interaction strength for the energy efficiency.