Progress, Opportunities and Challenges for Beyond CMOS Information Processing Technologies

During the past 10 years, a great deal of worldwide research has been expended exploring novel devices using alternative information tokens as a possible replacement for scaled CMOS. The preliminary conclusion coming out of the research thus far is that the novel devices offer additional options to CMOS in the energy-delay tradeoff but do not appear to offer significantly enhanced power delay when operated as an isolated bistable binary switch. This conclusion points the way to other devices that provide higher levels of functionality such as non volatility or more complex gate operations. One specific magnetic nanodevice is called the Spin Torque Logic Device that functions as a majority gate with non volatile state will be described in considerable depth. Small arrays of locally interacting devices may be useful for certain Non Boolean operations and will be described.