Spintronics for Energy- Efficient Computing: An Overview and Outlook

From the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) to tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR), their subsequent application in large capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) greatly speeded up the information era over the past decades. However, the growing demand for big-data storage and processing is limited by the von-Neumann architecture due to the memory bottleneck and power dissipation. Taking advantage of nonvolatility, high speed, and low power, magnetic random access memory (MRAM) becomes a promising candidate to overcome this limitation through processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures. In this article, we provide an overview of existing technology and give a roadmap of spintronic devices for future energy-efficient computing and its relevant integration architectures. We begin with the fundamentals of Toggle-MRAM and spin-transfer torque (STT)-MRAM, which already have commercial applications. We then introduce spin-orbit torque (SOT), a critical mechanism to realize low-power data manipulation in the next generation of MRAM and summarize the recent experimental breakthroughs of field-free SOT switching schemes. Finally, we present MRAM-based PIM architectures and novel spintronic devices, provide an application outlook, and deliver the future development potential of energy-efficient computing systems.