A Universal Nonvolatile Processing Environment

The term spintronics is very general and covers a vast number of devices with an extreme variety in operating principles and practical feasibility for commercial applications. This chapter concentrates on what, in opinion, appears to be the most feasible technology for large‐scale integration in the next few years: the combination of complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor (CMOS) with nonvolatile magnetoresistive random‐access memory (MRAM). Importantly, the all‐electrical magnetization manipulation in modern MRAM by spin transfer torque (STT) renders the wires for separate magnetic field generation superfluous and also significantly reduces the magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) switching energy. Promising spintronic solutions with respect to speed and power consumption have been able to compete with CMOS‐only solutions. The resulting nonvolatile processing environment features a highly regular structure, is computationally complete, and reduces the information transport due to its shared buffers. It also offers the possibility of being used as a bias‐field‐free oscillator while preserving an extremely small footprint.