Straintronics: Manipulating the Magnetization of Magnetostrictive Nanomagnets with Strain for Energy-Efficient Applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the emerging field of straintronics, where magnetostrictive nanomagnets are manipulated with strain to enable energy-efficient information processing, storage, and communication technologies, highlighting recent advances and future challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent developments in straintronics, emphasizing its potential for low-energy applications and outlining future research directions.

Findings

Straintronics enables non-volatile, energy-efficient magnetic state manipulation.

Recent advances include strain-based logic, memory, and signal generation.

Key challenges involve material integration and device scalability.

Abstract

The desire to perform information processing, computation, communication, signal generation and related tasks, while dissipating as little energy as possible, has inspired many ideas and paradigms. One of the most powerful among them is the notion of using magnetostrictive nanomagnets as the primitive units of the hardware platforms and manipulating their magnetizations with electrically generated static or time varying mechanical strain to elicit myriad functionalities. This approach has two advantages. First, information can be retained in the devices after powering off since the nanomagnets are non-volatile unlike charge-based devices such as transistors. Second, the energy expended to perform a given task is exceptionally low since it takes very little energy to alter magnetization states with strain. This field is now known as "straintronics", in analogy with electronics, spintronics, valleytronics, etc. We review the recent advances and trends in straintronics, including digital information processing (logic), information storage (memory), domain wall devices operated with strain, control of skyrmions with strain, non-Boolean computing and machine learning with straintronics, signal generation (microwave sources) and communication (ultra-miniaturized acoustic and electromagnetic antennas) implemented with strained nanomagnets, hybrid straintronics-magnonics, and interaction between phonons and magnons in straintronic systems. We identify key challenges and opportunities, and lay out pathways to advance this field to the point where it might become a mainstream technology for energy-efficient systems.