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Ultra-low-energy straintronics using multiferroic composites

The primary impediment to continued improvement of traditional charge-based electronic devices in accordance with Moore's law is the excessive energy dissipation that takes place in the devices during switching of bits. One very promising solution is to utilize strain-mediated multiferroic composites, i.e., a magnetostrictive nanomagnet strain-coupled to a piezoelectric layer, where the magnetization can be switched between its two stable states in sub-nanosecond delay while expending a minuscule amount of energy of ~1 attojoule at room-temperature. Apart from devising digital memory and logic, these multiferroic devices can be also utilized for analog signal processing, e.g., voltage amplifier. First, we briefly review the recent advances on multiferroic straintronic devices and then we show here that in a magnetostrictive nanomagnet, it is possible to achieve the so-called Landauer limit (or the ultimate limit) of energy dissipation of amount "kT ln(2)" compensating the entropy loss, thereby linking information and thermodynamics.