Logic circuits using magnetic domain walls

In conventional electronic architectures, the separation of logic and memory operations creates a bottleneck that limits the types of computations that can be performed. However, technologies that exploit the electron’s spin degree of freedom, rather than the charge, for logic operations have the potential of combining logic and memory functions, as magnetic spin states can also act as a memory. Zhaochu Luo and colleagues now demonstrate reconfigurable NAND and NOR logic gates using the magnetization direction of domain walls in racetracks, which represent the Boolean logic values 1 and 0, and then cascade several gates to build XOR and full adder gates. As the magnetic domains are non-volatile and these operations are all-electric, this study shows that domain-wall racetracks are a viable platform for memory-in-logic applications.