Compact Spintronic Muller C-Element with Near-Zero Standby Energy

The complementary roles of asynchronous architecture with nonvolatile spintronic devices are explored herein to realize a novel asynchronous logic element. By redesigning the Muller C-element to take advantage of spintronic device non-volatility and area efficiency, benefits such as reduced asynchronous handshaking area overhead, are achieved in addition to instant on/off capabilities for reduced static-power dissipation through power gating. We propose a novel eight transistor and one spintronic device Muller C-element design which is 20% faster and uses 68% of the power of previous non-volatile Muller C-element designs. This spintronic Muller C-element is demonstrated within a four-phase dual-rail asynchronous pipeline resulting in 48% fewer transistors in comparison with the previous designs. Additionally, bundled-data protocol overhead is shown to be reduced by using the spintronic Muller C-element proposed herein. Detailed analysis of the effects of driving transistor width and the tunneling magnetoresistance ratio on device performance characteristics is included.