Modeling and Power Evaluation of On-Chip Router Components in Spintronics

On-chip routers are power hungry components. Besides exploiting current CMOS-based power-saving techniques, it is also desirable to investigate the power saving potential enabled by new technologies and devices. This paper investigates the potential of exploiting the emerging spin-electronics based MTJ (Magnetic Tunnel Junction) devices with application to on-chip router modules, in particular, buffers and crossbars. To this end, we build MTJ models, design circuits based on mixed MTJ-CMOS devices, and evaluate their switching power consumption, using their pure CMOS counterparts as the baseline. Our study shows that the new technology can significantly improve power efficiency for buffers but the gain for crossbars is less clear.