A magnetoelectronic macrocell employing reconfigurable threshold logic

  • Authors:
  • Steve P. Ferrera;Nicholas P. Carter

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL;University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL

  • Venue:
  • FPGA '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/SIGDA 12th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a reconfigurable fabric based around a new class of circuit element: the hybrid Hall effect (HHE) magnetoelectronic device. Because they incorporate a ferromagnetic element, HHE devices are inherently non-volatile, retaining their state without a power supply. In addition, HHE devices are extremely well-suited to implementing threshold logic circuits, which allows many complex logic functions to be implemented in fewer gates than are required in systems based on AND-OR logic. We present the design of an HHE-based reconfigurable macrocell based on two-level threshold logic that can be configured on a cycle-by-cycle basis while internally storing non-volatile configuration data and computation state. The performance of this macrocell is characterized, and compared to that of competing technologies, showing that it has a significantly better power-delay product when implementing complex functions of many inputs.