Online Joint seminar by HKUST-ACE and EDSSC - Spintronics: From Memory to Computing in Memory

Spintronics has been widely studied for decades and various applications have been incubated from spintronics. Particularly, spintronic memory has been considered as one of the most promising nonvolatile memory candidates to address the leakage power consumption in the post-Moore’s era. To date, spintronic memory family has evolved in four-generation technology advancement and has achieved mass production in standalone and embedded applications. On the other hand, from the architectural perspective, data transfer bandwidth and the related power consumption has become the most critical bottleneck in von-Neumann computing architecture, owing to the separation of the processor and the memory units and the performance mismatch between the two. Realization of the unity of data computing and storage in the same chip has opened up a promising research direction of computing-in-memory (CIM). Spintronic memory could be a potential candidate to implement the CIM paradigm from both technology and application perspectives. Lots of interests have been attracted and a number of attempts have been made in this field. In this talk, I will briefly introduce why and how computing in spintronic memory, and our work on this direction.