Magnetic Cellular Automata Wire Architectures (TNano 2010)

J. Pulecio, P. Pendru, A. Kumari and S. Bhanja, “Magnetic Cellular Automata Wire Architectures”, Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, 2010.

Magnetic Cellular Automata (MCA) is an appealing approach for a novel implementation of Boolean logic machines. Not only has it been able to prototypically demonstrate successful operation of logical gates at room temperature, but it has also realized all the key components necessary to implement any Boolean function. This moves the viability of the technology dramatically ahead of other flavors of Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA), and solicits researchers to examine the various aspects of MCA. Here we investigate an extremely critical facet of the MCA system, the interconnecting wire. We present work further reducing the size of the single domain nano-magnet, approximately 100 x 50 x 30 nm, and physically implement two types of MCA wire architectures, ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic. We provide external magnetic fields and investigate 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 we found under the various directions of saturating magnetic fields demonstrates the flexible clocking nature of ferromagnetic wires, and inches the technology closer to implementing complex circuitry.