Parallel and Serial Computation in Nanomagnet Logic: An Overview

Nanomagnet logic (NML) is a promising technology beyond CMOS technology because it can guarantee an extremely low-power consumption. This technology is extremely different from CMOS in some peculiar aspects: 1) logic gates and wires have the same delay and 2) the layout of a circuit influences its timing characteristics. With these characteristics, it is clear that a simple mapping of CMOS register-transfer level circuits in NML would be inefficient. Circuit logic design must be adapted to this new technology. One interesting aspect is the opportunity to design bit-serial circuits instead of parallel ones and achieve comparable performance with less area occupation. In this paper, we explore the parallel and serial design in NML with magnetoelastic clock through a common case study: the multiply and accumulate algorithm. This is designed in three different versions (fully parallel, fully serial, and parallel–serial) and analyzed in terms of latency, throughput, area occupation, and circuit dissipation.