Challenges and opportunities for skymionic racetrack devices*

Skyrmions are potential low energy information carrying bits for high density memory and logic applications. We propose to use the current-induced displacement of voltage gated skyrmions as a native memory for temporal computing¹ as well as conventional Boolean logic operations². One of the main challenges however is the positional stability of skyrmions. In a magnetic racetrack, large skyrmions tend to thermally diffuse while small skyrmions pin. Our models show that by engineering notches we can create controlled pinning sites in a racetrack, leading to a reliable skyrmionic device with small diffusion and moderate unpinning current.
1. H. Vakili et al., "Temporal Memory with Magnetic Racetracks," in IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits, DOI: 10.1109/JXCDC.2020.3022381.
2. H. Vakili et al., "Self-focusing Hybrid Skyrmions in spatially varying canted ferromagnetic systems," in http://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00729