Circuit Level Modeling of Spintronic Devices

It is an exciting time for circuit designers working on beyond-CMOS logic and memory design. Many alternative technologies to conventional Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology have been proposed in recent years and there is an ongoing effort by many state of the art research institutes around the world to fabricate these devices. The magneto-electric (ME) devices are just one class of beyond-CMOS device, but they offer some advantages which make them a very promising group of devices, including non-volatility, voltage control, together with low power operation. These devices are extremely compact compared to the CMOS equivalents. Many of the advantages of the ME devices are known although there have been no quantitative studies for the calculation of the energy requirements of voltage control of magnetism, thus it is important to understand the trade-offs of the components. Perceiving a need for a modeling platform for simulating the possible logic circuits that can be derived from the ME devices and also perform an energy-delay evaluation of these devices, we developed Verilog-A models. These are used as a modeling platform for simulating ME devices in Spectre to evaluating their performance compared to conventional CMOS at the circuit level.