February 2019

Researchers from Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have experimentally demonstrated a breakthrough in one of the major problems blocking the adoption of magnetic domain wall memory.

When recording each fresh bit of information onto a racetrack, there is considerable uncertainty about where each magnetic domain starts and ends, and an incorrectly-written bit can easily lead to the corruption of bits. The team, led by Professor Rachid Sbiaa of Sultan Qaboos University, devised a method to overcome this difficulty by using a staggered nanowire (see figure below).

Researchers from Japan's Tohoku University have developed a nonvolatile microcontroller unit (MCU) which achieves both high performance and ultra-low power by utilizing spintronics-based VLSI design technology and STT-MRAM memory.

The researchers used several new techniques to create an efficient and fast device. Each module's power supply is controlled independently, which eliminates wasteful power consumption, while a memory controller and a reconfigurable accelerator module are used to relax data transfer bottlenecks. These new techniques enabled the researchers to achieve ultra-lower power consumptioN (47.14 uW) at 200Mhz.

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie Institute demonstrate how it is possible to induce a magnetic order on a small region of a material by using a small electric field, instead of commonly used magnetic field.

Te researchers used a wedge-shaped polycrystalline iron thin film deposited on top of a BaTiO₃ substrate (a well-known ferroelectric and ferroelastic material). Given their small size, the magnetic moments of the iron nanograins are disordered with respect to each other, this state is known as superparamagnetism.