Electric Field Driven Magnetic Cellular Automata for Image Processing

We describe an original scheme of Magnetic Cellular Automata consisting of cells made of diluted magnetic semiconductor (DMS) material. The magnetic phase of the cell (paramagnetic/ferromagnetic) is controlled by hole injection via the effect of hole-mediated ferromagnetism. Being in the ferromagnetic phase, the cell is suitable for binary information encoding (spins up or spins down). We propose to exploit hole-mediated ferromagnetism (and the phase transition from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic behavior) for electric-field driven magnetic cellular automata. The operation of the proposed cellular automata is illustrated by numerical modeling. Potentially, the proposed scheme may be beneficial in terms of power consumption (>;10^-15 J for one operation). It also makes possible to accomplish different image processing functions on one fabricated substrate. The disadvantages and shortcomings of the proposed scheme are discussed.