Perspective: There is plenty of room for magnetic straintronics in the analog domain

Magnetic straintronics made its debut more than a decade ago as an extremely energy-efficient paradigm for implementing a digital switch for digital information processing. The switch consists of a slightly elliptical nano-sized magnetostrictive disk in elastic contact with a poled ultrathin piezoelectric layer (forming a two-phase multiferroic system). Because of the elliptical shape, the nanomagnet’s magnetization has two stable (mutually antiparallel) orientations along the major axis, which can encode the binary bits 0 and 1. A voltage pulse of sub-ns duration and amplitude few to few tens of mV applied across the piezoelectric generates enough strain in the nanomagnet to switch its magnetization from one stable state to the other by virtue of the inverse magnetostriction (or Villari) effect, with an energy expenditure that is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than what it takes to switch a modern-day electronic transistor. That possibility, along with the fact that such a switch is non-volatile unlike the conventional transistor, generated significant excitement. However, it was later tempered by the realization that straintronic switching is also extremely error-prone, which may preclude many digital applications, particularly in Boolean logic. In this perspective, we offer the view that there is plenty of room for magnetic straintronics in the analog domain, which is much more forgiving of switching errors, and where the excellent energy-efficiency and non-volatility are a boon. Analog straintronics can have intriguing applications in many areas, such as a new genre of aggressively miniaturized electromagnetic antennas that defy the Harrington limits on the gain and radiation efficiency of conventional antennas, analog arithmetic multipliers (and ultimately vector matrix multipliers) for non-volatile deep learning networks with very small footprint and excellent energy-efficiency, and relatively high-power microwave oscillators with output frequency in the X-band. When combined with spintronics, analog straintronics can also implement a new type of spin field effect transistor employing quantum materials such as topological insulators, and they have unusual transfer characteristics which can be exploited for analog tasks such as frequency multiplication using just a single transistor. All this hints at a world of new possibilities in the analog domain that deserves serious attention.