Design and fabrication of nanomagnetic majority logic gate based on spin hall assisted switching

In recent years, spin-orbit torques induced by charge current in heavy metal/magnetic structures have attracted wide attention among researchers. Since the experimental demonstration of spin-orbit torques due to the spin Hall effect (SHE) being able to manipulate the magnetization direction in an in-plane MTJ structure[1], it has been heavily explored for applications in memory and logic. It provides a potential low power alternative to other techniques such as spin transfer torque or electric field control for magnetization reversal. Recently, it has been shown that the spin Hall effect can provide a clocking mechanism for logic applications where the spin Hall effect is used to change the magnetization of a perpendicularly magnetized device along the hard axis (in the plane of the film)[2]. In [2], a series of three nanomagets are spaced closely together so they interact through dipole interactions. Each nanomagnet serves as a logic bit. An additional nearby magnet is used as the input. However, due to the dipole interactions, only logic states of 101 or 010 can be obtained. For logic applications, it would be beneficial to be able to individually control the states of the individual bits to obtain a full range of logic functions.