ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a short introduction into the physics necessary to understand the spintronic effects, like the magnetoresistance effect, spin-transfer torque, spin Hall effect, and the magnetoelectric effect. It focuses on and examines concepts and devices that are complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible and present possibilities for different levels of integration into CMOS technology. The access transistor is a four terminal such as gate, source, drain, and body device for a bulk CMOS process and a three terminal device for a silicon on insulator process. The nonvolatile flip flop exploits spin-transfer torques and magnetic exchange coupling within its free layer to perform the actual computation instead of relying on external CMOS transistors. The communication between the memory and the logic is significantly decreased and the auxiliary CMOS circuits for the signal conversion between the CMOS and the spintronic domain become redundant, which in turn greatly improves the omnipresent leakage power and interconnection delay problems.
