Straintronics: Strain-switched multiferroic nanomagnets for extremely low energy logic/memory

Straintronics is an extraordinarily energy-efficient novel hardware paradigm for digital computing and signal processing. The central idea is to build the basic binary switch with a nanoscale multiferroic consisting of a magnetostrictive layer elastically coupled to a piezoelectric layer. A tiny voltage of a few mV generates sufficient strain in the piezoelectric layer to switch the magnetization of the magnetostrictive nanomagnet for a memory or logic operation, while dissipating few aJ of energy. Low density processors employing straintronics and operating at slow clock speeds of ?100 MHz are estimated to dissipate such low power that they can run by harvesting energy from the ambient and never even need a battery. We have designed straintronic logic gates and memory cells, and extracted their performance figures with Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert simulations to predict unprecedented energy efficiency. Rudimentary non-volatile logic and memory functions have been demonstrated experimentally and validate the low energy expectations.