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Complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices display volatile characteristics, and are not well suited for analog applications such as neuromorphic computing. Spintronic devices, on the other hand, exhibit both non-volatile and analog features, which are well-suited to neuromorphic computing. Consequently, these novel devices are at the forefront of beyond-CMOS artificial intelligence applications. However, a large quantity of these artificial neuromorphic devices still require the use of CMOS, which decreases the efficiency of the system. To resolve this, we have previously proposed a number of artificial neurons and synapses that do not require CMOS for operation. Although these devices are a significant improvement over previous renditions, their ability to enable neural network learning and recognition is limited by their intrinsic activation functions. This work proposes modifications to these spintronic neurons that enable configuration of the activation functions through control of the shape of a magnetic domain wall track. Linear and sigmoidal activation functions are demonstrated in this work, which can be extended through a similar approach to enable a wide variety of activation functions.

We propose a hardware learning rule for unsupervised clustering within a novel spintronic computing architecture. The proposed approach leverages the three-terminal structure of domain-wall magnetic tunnel junction devices to establish a feedback loop that serves to train such devices when they are used as synapses in a neuromorphic computing architecture.

Neuromorphic computing promises revolutionary improvements over conventional systems for applications that process unstructured information. To fully realize this potential, neuromorphic systems should exploit the biomimetic behavior of emerging nanodevices. In particular, exceptional opportunities are provided by the non-volatility and analog capabilities of spintronic devices. While spintronic devices have previously been proposed that emulate neurons and synapses, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices are required to implement multilayer spintronic perceptron crossbars. This work therefore proposes a new spintronic neuron that enables purely spintronic multilayer perceptrons, eliminating the need for CMOS circuitry and simplifying fabrication.

Spintronic devices based on domain wall (DW) motion through ferromagnetic nanowire tracks have received great interest as components of neuromorphic information processing systems. Previous proposals for spintronic artificial neurons required external stimuli to perform the leaking functionality, one of the three fundamental functions of a leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron. The use of this external magnetic field or electrical current stimulus results in either a decrease in energy efficiency or an increase in fabrication complexity. In this work, we modify the shape of previously demonstrated three-terminal magnetic tunnel junction neurons to perform the leaking operation without any external stimuli. The trapezoidal structure causes shape-based DW drift, thus intrinsically providing the leaking functionality with no hardware cost. This LIF neuron therefore promises to advance the development of spintronic neural network crossbar arrays.