From the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) to tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR), their subsequent application in large capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) greatly speeded up the information era over the past decades. However, the growing demand for big-data storage and processing is limited by the von-Neumann architecture due to the memory bottleneck and power dissipation. Taking advantage of nonvolatility, high speed, and low power, magnetic random access memory (MRAM) becomes a promising candidate to overcome this limitation through processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures. In this article, we provide an overview of existing technology and give a roadmap of spintronic devices for future energy-efficient computing and its relevant integration architectures. We begin with the fundamentals of Toggle-MRAM and spin-transfer torque (STT)-MRAM, which already have commercial applications. We then introduce spin-orbit torque (SOT), a critical mechanism to realize low-power data manipulation in the next generation of MRAM and summarize the recent experimental breakthroughs of field-free SOT switching schemes. Finally, we present MRAM-based PIM architectures and novel spintronic devices, provide an application outlook, and deliver the future development potential of energy-efficient computing systems.

中文翻译：

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用于节能计算的自旋电子学：概述和展望


从巨磁阻（GMR）的发现到隧道磁阻（TMR），它们随后在大容量硬盘驱动器（HDD）中的应用极大地加速了过去几十年信息时代的发展。然而，由于内存瓶颈和功耗，冯诺依曼架构限制了对大数据存储和处理不断增长的需求。磁性随机存取存储器 (MRAM) 凭借非易失性、高速和低功耗的优势，成为通过内存处理 (PIM) 架构克服这一限制的有希望的候选者。在本文中，我们概述了现有技术，并给出了未来节能计算的自旋电子器件及其相关集成架构的路线图。我们从 Toggle-MRAM 和自旋转移矩 (STT)-MRAM 的基础知识开始，它们已经具有商业应用。然后，我们介绍了自旋轨道扭矩（SOT），这是在下一代 MRAM 中实现低功耗数据操作的关键机制，并总结了无场 SOT 切换方案的最新实验突破。最后，我们提出了基于MRAM的PIM架构和新型自旋电子器件，提供了应用前景，并揭示了节能计算系统的未来发展潜力。