Description:

Title: Spintronic and Magneto-Resistive Logic for Beyond-CMOS Computing

Speaker: Alan V. Sahakian, Northwestern, EECS

Abstract: Dennard scaling of the MOSFET transistors used in CMOS logic and its contribution to the Moore’s law increase in transistor count has taken us through four decades of faster, smaller and lower-power VLSI but is now encountering fundamental physical limits.  This is an opportunity for engineers to step back and consider new logic structures and computing paradigms which will take us into the future.  The MOSFET uses electric field effects to modulate conduction through a channel but magnetic fields may also be used to control conduction in semiconductor devices.  In this talk I will discuss some of our work in novel logic circuit topologies and device structures which use magnetic field effects to gain logical efficiency and speed, and to realize other unconventional computing properties such as non-volatility. This is joint work with my Ph.D. student Joseph Friedman (now a post-doc at the University of Paris-Sud) and collaborators Professors Bruce Wessels and Gokhan Memik of Northwestern University.

Host: Anupam Garg

Speaker Schedule

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium