Hall-effect circuits and architectures for nonvolatile system design

Many of the limitations of electronic systems, including data loss on power failures, high standby power consumption, and susceptibility to radiation-induced soft errors, derive from the fact that semiconductor devices rely on capacitatively-stored charge to represent state information. In this paper, we describe a novel magnetoelectronic circuit element, the hybrid Hall effect device that can be used to implement nonvolatile logic and storage. We present circuit designs for reconfigurable magnetoelectronic gates based on this device, and outline a microprocessor architecture that incorporates magnetoelectronic devices to enable it to consume zero idle power and tolerate power failures.