Simulation study of an electrically read- and writable magnetic logic gate

In order to keep up with economic growth and competitiveness the performance of microelectronic components will continuously increase, thanks to the introduction of new device types and materials. Spin based technologies are promising candidates because of their fast switching capability, high endurance, and non-volatility. Furthermore, the use of spin as a degree of freedom permits the combination of information storage and processing in a single device creating a fully non-volatile information processing system and thus allowing an even denser layout of simplified building blocks. Recently a fully electrical read-write 1 bit demonstrator memory device out of a ferromagnetic semiconductor has been shown and it has been proposed to extend this device to a logic XOR gate. However, up to now neither the feasibility of this gate nor the extendability to further logic gates has been shown. In this work we carried out a rigorous simulation study of the proposed logic gate. We are able to show that firstly the magnetization can be switched diagonally. Secondly, by changing the relative angle between the current flow path and the magnetization, not only a XOR gate is feasible but also (N)AND and (N)OR gates can be realized.