A magnonic directional coupler for integrated magnonic half-adders

• Published in: Nature electronics Vol. 3; no. 12; pp. 765 - 774
• Main Authors: Wang, Q., Kewenig, M., Schneider, M., Verba, R., Kohl, F., Heinz, B., Geilen, M., Mohseni, M., Lägel, B., Ciubotaru, F., Adelmann, C., Dubs, C., Cotofana, S. D., Dobrovolskiy, O. V., Brächer, T., Pirro, P., Chumak, A. V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01-12-2020
• Subjects: 639/766/1130/2798; 639/766/119/1001; 639/925/927/1062; 96/63; 96/95; Electrical Engineering; Engineering
• ISSN: 2520-1131; 2520-1131
• DOI: 10.1038/s41928-020-00485-6

Magnons, the quanta of spin waves, could be used to encode information in beyond-Moore computing applications, and magnonic device components, including logic gates, transistors and units for non-Boolean computing, have already been developed. Magnonic directional couplers, which can function as circuit building blocks, have also been explored, but have been impractical because of their millimetre dimensions and multimode spectra. Here, we report a magnonic directional coupler based on yttrium iron garnet that has submicrometre dimensions. The coupler consists of single-mode waveguides with a width of 350 nm. We use the amplitude of a spin wave to encode information and to guide it to one of the two outputs of the coupler depending on the signal magnitude, frequency and the applied magnetic field. Using micromagnetic simulations, we also propose an integrated magnonic half-adder that consists of two directional couplers and we investigate its functionality for information processing within the magnon domain. The proposed half-adder is estimated to consume energy in the order of attojoules.
A magnonic directional coupler with submicrometre dimensions could be used as a building block for integrated magnonic devices, such as half-adders, that have low energy consumption and small footprint.