SHE-NVFF: Spin Hall Effect-Based Nonvolatile Flip-Flop for Power Gating Architecture

Author

Kon-Woo Kwon ; Choday, Sri Harsha ; Yusung Kim ; Xuanyao Fong ; Park, Sang Phill ; Roy, Kaushik

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN, USA

Volume

35

Issue

4

fYear

2014

fDate

41730

Firstpage

488

Lastpage

490

Abstract

A novel nonvolatile flip-flop (NVFF) using a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) is presented for power gating architecture. The proposed NVFF exploits spin Hall effect (SHE) for fast and low-power data backup into MTJs before the power is gated off. Owing to the high spin injection efficiency of SHE, the estimated write current for backup operation is lower than 40 μA. Due to the low write current requirement, we do not introduce a dedicated write driver circuit. Instead, we utilize the cross-coupled inverters in the slave latch to perform the backup operation, resulting in low area overhead. The simulation results show 10× improvement in backup energy when compared with previous works on spin transfer torque-based NVFFs.

Keywords

flip-flops; logic gates; low-power electronics; magnetic tunnelling; magnetoelectronics; spin Hall effect; MTJ; SHE-NVFF; cross-coupled inverters; low area overhead; low write current; low-power data backup; magnetic tunnel junction; power gating architecture; slave latch; spin Hall effect-based nonvolatile flip-flop; write driver circuit; Hall effect; Latches; Magnetic tunneling; Magnetization; Resistance; Spin polarized transport; Switches; Magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ); nonvolatile flip-flop (NVFF); power gating; spin Hall effect (SHE);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electron Device Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0741-3106

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LED.2014.2304683

Filename

6739125