Novel MTJ-based shift register for non-volatile logic applications

The increasing costs and leakage losses have become the major concerns for CMOS technology scaling. A possible way to address in particular the standby power problem is to introduce non-volatility into the devices and circuit blocks so that unused devices or even entire circuit blocks do not waste energy, and power is only spent, when information is read or written. Recently, we proposed a non-volatile magnetic flip flop which moves the information storage and processing from the CMOS domain to the magnetic domain. Here, we propose a way to extend the functionality of the device to a shift register; computing via spin wave superposition and passing information by spin torque transfer (STT). The presented shift register and its operation allows an extremely dense layout, is CMOS compatible, and non-volatile.