Defect characterization in magnetic field coupled arrays

Defect characterization in magnetic field coupled arrays Kumari, A. Pulecio, J.F. Bhanja, S. Electr. Eng. Dept., Univ. of South Florida, Tampa, FL This paper appears in: Quality of Electronic Design, 2009. ISQED 2009. Quality of Electronic Design Publication Date: 16-18 March 2009 On page(s): 436 - 441 Location: San Jose, CA ISBN: 978-1-4244-2952-3 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ISQED.2009.4810334 Current Version Published: 2009-04-03

Abstract Magnetic Cellular Automata (MCA) utilizes mutual exchange energies of neighboring magnetic cells to order the single-domain magnetic cell which in turn performs computational tasks. In this paper, we study three dominant type of geometric defects (missing, spacing, merging) in array (used as interconnects) based on our fabrication experiments. We study effect of these defects in three segments of the array (near-input, center and near-output) and we have observed that location of these defects play an important role in masking of the errors. The observed simulation results indicate that most of the defects occurring around center and near-output would be masked generating correct behavior while defects in the near-input segment would mostly cause erroneous output. We also observe that MCA is extremely robust towards space irregularities, one of the most common form of defect we observed through our fabrication techniques.